Archival Print!

The graceful screenplay for Remember the Night was the last Sturges would write for a director other than himself. Mitchell Leisen shared Sturges's cultivated sense of character humor, but not his ferocious satiric impulse, and his direction makes Remember the Night a fuller, more modulated film than one Sturges might have made from the same script. Barbara Stanwyck plays a jailed, jaded jewel thief who steals the heart of the district attorney 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. Stanwyck brings an irresistible combination of knowing wit and emotional depth to her role; as James Harvey wrote, "The Stanwyck temperament and style are at the heart of that tension between experience and innocence which so much preoccupies Sturges."