In this Preston Sturges screenplay directed by Mitchell Leisen, Barbara Stanwyck plays a jaded jewel thief who steals the heart of the district attorney (Fred MacMurray) who is prosecuting her. When he secures her bail so that she might come home with him to Indiana for the Christmas holidays, the yuletide rituals begin to stir the long-lost Hoosier in her. Leisen shared Sturges' cultivated sense of character humor, but not his outrageous cynicism, and Remember the Night is perhaps a fuller, more modulated film than one Sturges might have directed from the same script. Critic Michael Goodwin's reassessment finds it "subversive, ironic, entertaining,...full of the complexity of life."