What if I told you there was a holiday themed film from Hollywood’s golden age that manages to combine slapstick comedy and romantic drama while raising some of the most important questions you can ask yourself at Christmas or any time of year?
The 1940 film Remember the Night is such a film. It tends to show up on lists of “best Christmas movies you’ve never heard of” due to its unavailability on streaming services, not to mention a generic title that does nothing to indicate the actual plot, which is quite unique. Fred MacMurray plays an assistant district attorney named John Sargent assigned to prosecute a shoplifter with two prior offenses. Getting a guilty verdict and a prison sentence would be a cakewalk except for two details that could incline the jury towards leniency: it’s just days before Christmas, and the shoplifter in question is an attractive young woman, Lee Leander (Barbara Stanwyck).
Sargent pulls a procedural trick to get the trial postponed until after the holiday, betting that when the jury reconvenes on January 3rd, the holiday spirit will be gone and he can put her behind bars. She lets the court know just what she thinks of being stuck in jail awaiting trial during Christmas as she is led away. Feeling empathy for her, he pays her bail money himself. As he comments to her: “You haven’t been convicted yet.”
The bail bondsman makes an assumption about the bachelor attorney’s true motivation for bailing the pretty Miss Leander out of jail for a week’s Christmas vacation and delivers her to Sargent’s apartment as he is preparing to leave to visit his folks back home in Indiana. He displays dignified indifference to the bondsman’s insinuations and informs Leander she is free to spend the holidays as she wishes. But with no family, no money, and no access to her hotel room and belongings (having been locked out after running up a large tab), she would have just as soon stayed in jail with a warm bed and a turkey dinner if she isn’t being propositioned, thank you very much.
That gets her an invite to dinner, which turns into dancing, which turns into finding out they’re both Hoosiers, which turns into his offering to take her on his trip from New York to Indiana with him so she can spend Christmas with her mother that she hasn’t seen in years. (And you thought Hallmark’s Christmas movie plots were improbable.) During dinner Sargent quizzes Leander on her criminal record and she cheerfully admits to being a thief and a cheat, who would happily dine and dash after a six-course meal. When he’s not looking though, her mask slips a bit and we get our first sense that she may not be as amoral as she claims.
After getting lost in the middle of pre-Turnpike Pennsylvania and waking up in a cowfield, they are summarily dragged before a local justice of the peace for trespassing, destruction of a fence, and theft of a Thermos bottle’s worth of fresh milk. Sargent’s lawyerly attempt at talking their way out of the mess is overridden by Leander discreetly lighting the justice’s wastepaper basket on fire to enable an escape. They hightail it out of town, not stopping until they reach the Ohio line.
When they arrive at her childhood home in Indiana, Sargent discovers that there was a reason Leander left home and turned to petty theft at an early age: her mother was verbally abusive, had decided the girl was a ‘wrong-un’ early in life, and the years have not changed that opinion. He tactfully indicates that Leander is welcome to come to his mother’s farm with him, and Lee gratefully accepts through a flood of tears.
Mother Sargent is unsurprisingly as warm and gracious as Ma Leander was cold and judgmental. She and her sister, Aunt Emma, take Lee under their wings. The never-married Aunt Emma in particular demonstrates a definite interest in turning this woman her nephew claims to have no romantic feelings for into the perfect housewife.
Over the course of the week between Christmas and New Year’s we see Lee adjust to the warm family life she never had, while dropping hints to a presumably unaffected John (just as she had since they first met in his apartment), that despite the circumstances she’s available if he’d just ask. It culminates in a New Year’s Eve barn dance where Lee wears Aunt Emma’s 1908 vintage wedding dress (which for unspecified reasons was never used for a wedding) and John finally cracks.
Then comes a scene that could have ruined the whole movie if not handled well by two great actors: Stanwyck and Beulah Bondi (who plays Mrs. Sargent). Before Lee can sneak off to John’s room that final night, Mrs. Sargent gently confronts Lee and explains John’s rise to success to her: how his father died while he was young and they were very poor, so he had to work when not in school to pay his way to college and law school. This scene manages to convey the emotional stakes in John and Lee’s relationship without turning the audience against Mrs. Sargent, because Bondi conveys that her character’s opposition to the relationship is only motivated by her love for her son and his accomplishments, rather than any judgement against Lee for her crimes.
They leave the next morning to return to New York, and even though he’s finally admitted that he’s smitten, it doesn’t change the fact that John is duty-bound to prosecute Lee for theft and get her sent to the state pen as a repeat offender. On their drive back by way of Ontario (to dodge Pennsylvania where they are still wanted under assumed names in a certain hamlet) John tells Lee she could jump bail and escape. He’s also ready to mishandle the case in order to get her acquitted if she returns to New York. Meanwhile, after her conversation with Mrs. Sargent, Lee recognizes that if he does throw her case and then enters into a relationship with her, everything he has worked for since he was young will be destroyed in the resulting scandal.
In the courtroom, John shifts from the understated and dignified prosecutorial approach he showed at the beginning of the film and instead browbeats the jury and Lee, knowing that by alienating the jury and abusing the defendant, he would cause her to be acquitted of what was a ‘victimless’ crime out of sympathy. Instead of letting John go through with this gambit, Lee turns to the judge and demands to change her plea to guilty, in an emotional scene where both Stanwyck and MacMurray’s talents are on full display as he tries desperately to keep her from changing her plea.
try to stop her
The final scene is of John asking Lee to marry him at once before she is sentenced to prison. She refuses, but asks him to stand by her when she is sentenced and come visit her in prison. The film ends without a coda, leaving it to the viewer to decide what the ultimate fate of these two will be. Does she pay her debt to society and then marry him with her head held high, or will they drift apart during the next few years while she is imprisoned?
Heavy stuff for a Christmas movie. But no heavier, one must admit, than a miser being confronted with his eventual doom by the ghost of his dead business partner, or an exhausted husband and father contemplating suicide on Christmas Eve. I heard a pastor remark once that the Christmas season seems to magnify both good and bad, light and dark, joy and pain. For the happy, it is the happiest time of the year. For the sad, it is the saddest. And as this dichotomy tends to cause people to re-evaluate and question their lives, the Christmas season is the ideal time of year to set a story of redemption.
At the beginning of the film, Lee Leander is fairly blasé to her situation. As expounded in the opening minutes, this isn’t the first time she’s been arrested for shoplifting. She acknowledges to John over dinner that kleptomania has been tried as a defense for her actions in the past, but as she breezily informs him, it didn’t work because since she sold the items she stole, she “[lost her] amateur standing.” As she celebrates the holiday with John and his family, she gets a sense of what she’s missing and has missed in her rootless life. That causes her façade to crack and she starts to show her fear at the reality of her situation and the probability of a few years in prison.
Her unhappy childhood is hinted at when she is discussing her shared Indiana background with John, but it is the return to her childhood home that casts this in a stark light. The scene feels like Scrooge being confronted with the Ghost of Christmas Future, except in Lee’s case it is actually the ghost of Christmases past. Having been accused of being a thief by her own mother in front of the whole town, rendering her unemployable, she turned to grifting her way through the big city.
This is contrasted with the story that Mrs. Sargent tells of a young John stealing her egg money and his paying it back, along with the overall warmth and love that Mrs. Sargent exudes.
There’s an old saying: “but for the grace of God go I”. I think that captures the essence of this film’s attitude towards its two main characters. The sense one gets when contrasting John and Lee is that they are basically equals in terms of their moral character, and it is their background that made the difference. Lee, like Huck Finn, decided that if everyone thought she was bad, she’d go and be bad. Meanwhile, John’s grit and success in rising from poverty to the office of assistant District Attorney in the biggest city in the US is clearly due in part to the good influence of his mother.
While Lee tells John early in the film in a tone that conveys both amazement and amusement “you never think of anything wrong, do you?”, the picture one gets of John Sargent is of someone who might not think of anything wrong on his own, but when temptation is presented to him, he’s pretty powerless to resist. He would have imploded his entire life and career in a fit of desire for Lee. The fact that he’s a decent guy without being overly heroic makes the story more balanced, nuanced, and therefore more interesting than a simplistic “white knight saves fallen damsel” fairy tale.
So let me finally put a nice big Christmas bow on this essay and summarize the fundamental reasons for why I like this film. I have been strongly influenced by C.S. Lewis’s observation in Mere Christianity that “if I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
When that observation is combined with my observing what stories resonate with us the most, I reached this conclusion: many of the secular narratives that we find most moving are moving because they speak to our ultimate need for a Savior. This need is so deeply ingrained in us that even when we don’t realize it, it is still crying out, sub-textually. I would argue that even though Jesus is never mentioned in this film set during the celebration of his birth, there’s a way in which He’s just offscreen.
Unlike so many movies with similar plots, Lee is transformed not by erotic or romantic love, but by kindness and mercy. John is genuinely compassionate, and the film makes it clear that his bailing Lee out, first from jail and then from her mother, has no ulterior motive behind it. That compassion is also shown by Mrs. Sargent and Aunt Emma, and it’s what causes Lee’s redemption as she recognizes that despite what she tells John during their first dinner, she isn’t just a thief with no moral sensibility. She sees that despite everything that’s happened since she ran away from home, there is still worth in her. At the end, far from being the amoral grifter she began the story as, she accepts responsibility for her actions instead of letting the twitterpated attorney get her out of it.
And that’s why I think this is just a great film. Screenwriter Preston Sturges memorably defined it as having the perfect combination of “schmaltz, schmerz, and schmutz” (sentiment, pain, and dirt) to be a winner at the box office. The story dances a fine line between comedy and melodrama and could have so easily been ruined by lesser actors. Fortunately, Stanwyck was one of the greatest natural talents in film history and this role was perfect for her gift for changing from one emotion to another in the blink of an eye. And Fred MacMurray gives an understated performance where like the male half of a ballroom dance team, he was the frame for Stanwyck to shine in.
The way the film ends is certainly going to be unsatisfying to some. We tend to like our stories neat and tidy: “And they all lived happily ever after.” But I think that the open-ended ending has value and in this situation is the appropriate conclusion. It forces the viewer to think about what they’ve observed about these two characters over the prior hundred or so minutes, and in a way exhibits humility on the part of the screenwriter to acknowledge that the final outcome of this tangled whirlwind romance is hard to determine. It has the courage to not give us what we might want, and instead leaves us with a story far more moving and transcendent than the average holiday romantic comedy.
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