Twelve Hidden Yuletide Gems
If you’re a film noir buff who’s seen all the classics, this Christmas film will throw you a real loop. Double Indemnity stars Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck are reunited, but the fare is much sweeter than in that gritty insurance-murder case … and Edward G. Robinson and his antacids are nowhere to be seen. In fact, this lesser-known film was made years before the white-hot noir of Indemnity, and written by Preston Sturges (better known for his sharp screwball comedies like The Lady Eve, also starring Stanwyck, and The Palm Beach Story).The film’s stylish director Mitchell Leison was a former art director, with a gift for setting the right visual and emotional mood in both romantic comedies and drama. Remember the Night, like Leison’s best films – Midnight, Hold Back the Dawn, and Death Takes a Holiday, merges great writing and a classy “look”, with a warm, down to earth view of people.
Stanwyck plays repeat offender Lee Leander, a shoplifter who is arraigned by assistant DA John Sargent (MacMurray). Thrown together during the holidays, the two Manhattanites discover they have a hometown in common; Sargent generously offers to drop Leander off to see her mother. Their families, with opposing viewpoints on love and forgiveness, are compared in sharp relief; when Leander’s mother seems unmoved by her prodigal child’s return, Sargent brings his new friend to his own home. Interestingly, Sargent’s likable, accepting mother is played by Beulah Bondi, probably best known as Jimmy Stewart’s mother in It’s a Wonderful Life.
A change of pace from more sticky holiday fare, Remember the Night is a meditation on the true meaning of love and family during Christmas.
(Strangely, a homage to this movie can be found in an episode of CBS’ military-legal drama JAG. 2001’s “Answered Prayers” finds a Naval prosecuting attorney helping out a young petty officer, caught impersonating a Salvation Army bell-ringer. Less of a romance and more about redemption, this episode’s storyline ends with the woman joining the regular cast.)
And so we part with twelve films to brighten your heart…
What? Twelve films not enough?
Of course, Virginia, there are still Christmas gems out there, if you want them…! Enough for every day of the Advent, through Boxing Day and then some! How about Tenth Avenue Angel (a 1948 Margaret O’Brien tearjerker set in New York’s mean streets); the incredibly gentle and poetic Star in the Night, a retelling of the Nativity; On Moonlight Bay and its Christmas sequel By the Light of The Silvery Moon, musical romances starring Doris Day; I’ll Be Seeing You (a sentimental road movie, similar plot to Remember the Night with Ginger Rogers and Joseph Cotton); The Cheaters (a 1945 Christmas screwball reminiscent of My Man Godfrey, costarring Eugene Pallette, the father in MMG); Three Godfathers (a John Wayne-John Ford classic, filmed many times, about three men and an orphan); Holiday (another holiday screwball pairing Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant yet again); Miracle of the Bells; It Happened On Fifth Avenue; Holiday Affair or the more recent Christmas in the Clouds, Bridget Jones’ Diary or While You Were Sleeping, holiday hymns to screwball romance?
Or you might just fast-forward to the dramatic, frothy New Year’s scenes in The Divorcee (Norma Shearer’s then-shocking 1930 dish about a marriage in trouble), Charlie Chaplin’s classic silent set in Alaska, The Gold Rush, or in the cruise-ship soapie Till We Meet Again, starring the luminescent Merle Oberon? Cavalcade is a classic that features repeated New Year’s Eves in the life of an English family. The strangely-plotted and even stranger pairing of Jimmy Stewart and Carole Lombard in Made for Each Other also features a pivotal New Year’s scene, and the lights go out in the original Ocean’s Eleven on New Year’s, thanks to ol’ Blue Eyes. There are even some modern classics to see – with two emotional New Year’s scenes, both penned by Nora Ephron, in When Harry Met Sally, and especially the firework-laden Sleepless in Seattle, where widower Tom Hanks shows palpable grief for his late wife.
