In this Sturges screenplay directed by Mitchell Leisen, Barbara Stanwyck plays a jailed, jaded jewel thief who steals the heart of the district attorney who is prosecuting her (Fred MacMurray). He secures her bail so that she might come home with him for the Christmas holidays in Indiana, where the yuletide rituals begin to stir the long-lost Hoosier in her. Leisen shared Sturges' cultivated sense of character humor, though not his outrageous cynicism, and Remember the Night is perhaps a fuller, more modulated film than one Sturges might have made from the same script. Critic Michael Goodwin's reassessment of this somewhat forgotten film finds it "subversive, ironic, entertaining; full of the complexity of life. It's a comedy of sorts, touching, human, marvelously constructed, purely Sturgean in its moral complexity and narrative irony-and so surely entertaining as to put every Academy Award winner of the last ten years to shame."