Remember the Night (Leisen, 1940) #DTC 461

A shoplifter ends up spending christmas eve with the district attorney and - obviously - falling in love with him.

My favorite scene is definitively when the car ends up on the meadow and a cow sticks her head into the car, trying to lick Barbara Stanwyck. Cows are funny creatures, as people have known long before Preston Sturges, but they still work - at least for me. Quite possibly it is their balancing on the tightrope between curiosity and fear, combined with their large, brown eyes that makes them so relentlessly funny. Maybe a character like that might prove interesting.

The film as a whole didn't work so good for me, although it has some very funny scenes: the scene with the small town judge/sheriff and some of the exchanges of the couple. It gets a bit too sentimental at the actual xmas ceremony and fails to pick up over that.

I did like the ending which was kept at least slightly ambiguous: will he still be there when she comes out? A script analysis would maybe state that it is HER story told from HIS perspective, but the balance doesn't hold up the interest of the viewer well enough.

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