In the 1942 film A Night to Remember, mystery writer Jeff Troy (Brian Aherne) and his wife Nancy (Loretta Young) move into their basement apartment one night and the next morning find a body in their garden. Even worse, the Mystery writer got into a fight with the dead man the night before. The couple discovers their apartment is full of secrets and a mystery worthy of one of the writer’s novels, but will they survive it?
The film has a lot going for it, with a solid cast in back of it including Lee Patrick and Sidney Toler in a non-Charlie Chan appearance as the local police inspector. It also has a good premise and a good dose of atmosphere, with some tense moments.
At the same time, A Night to Remember has some weak points including some pacing issues and leads who just don’t make you care that much about their characters as a couple, although Loretta Young is fun on her own. The mystery can also be a bit complex and hard to follow.
However, what may make A Night to Remember so forgettable is that it’s a very subtle satire of the amateur detective genre. It was from an era where comedies were often very broad. Neither Jeff or Nancy are the sort of broad comedic characters you’ll find in screwball comedies or the later satires Murder by Death and The Cheap Detective. The Troys are ordinary everyday people, with Jeff having a slightly above-average understanding of mystery solving. Thus they don’t bungle their way through the case is some uproariously hilarious way but rather in very subtle, everyday, ordinary ways. One example is when Jeff does as so many amateur sleuths do, and suggests that the police pick up a suspicious character, he finds that the police had already picked him up. Having the police just do their ordinary work in believable ways and show up the mystery writer is one of the movie’s great sources of humor.
One critic said the film is hard to hate and I think that’s a fair description. It’s not a stupid or very offensive film. It’s an hour and a half of diversion that’s different from a lot of its peers but in a way that makes it forgettable. If its sort of low-key, subtle approach is something you’re curious about or if you’re a fan of either Aherne or (especially) Young, it’d be worth watching.
If you seek out the film, be warned: 1) A 1958 film about the sinking of the Titanic has the same name, and 2) The only legal way to purchase the film is a DVD from Collector’s Choice which lacks even the sort of menus that Warner Archive provides with their releases. Instead, the film auto plays all the way through and will continue to do so until you act to stop it.
Rating: 3.0 out of 5.0
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For what little it’s worth, I heartily disagree with your review of the 1942 mystery-comedy, A NIGHT TO REMEMBER. I’ve long loved this film; its characters, atmosphere, plot — everything about it! Why it has been so neglected is, to me, the real mystery. It is true to its source, a murder-mystery novel by Kelly Roos, but improves on it greatly by, as it were, bringing it to life, the wonderful comedic touches in particular. But I’ve been at this long enough to know that “there’s no accounting for taste” (to paraphrase the old line often attributed to “Mrs. O’Leary as she kissed the cow.”). A case-in-point comes to mind as I prepare a pro-Philo Vance essay, that of one of his sundry detractors: Anthony Boucher, whose own mystery fiction is downright awful, his writing wordy and dull, as are his characters, and the “solutions” to otherwise “impossible crimes” replete with reworked elements that were cliches even back then! Yet the guy is lauded all over the place, and held many respectable positions in the field of mystery-fiction criticism. To resort to a cliche myself: Go figure!
Re: ole Philo, I did a film show with him for Cinefest; an article on the films for K’SCOPE (my magazine subsequently selected for Xerox’s University Microfilms Program); and wrote the liner notes for Radio Archives’ PHILO VANCE CD box sets (having interviewed the star of the Ziv radio series, Jackson Beck; this viewable online if calling up the second set in the series). And I immodestly declare myself to be the foremost S.S. Van Dine/Philo Vance collector, the collections often extensive — i.e., some 150 original stills from THE BISHOP MURDER CASE (MGM; 1930 — I also have a 16mm print in my large film collection, some of which have been borrowed by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the George Eastman House for restoration projects), first editions with dust-jackets of all the P.V. novels (save for THE BENSON MURDER CASE, the asking price of these far beyond my monetary reach!), and my most prized item, Clark Agnew’s original painting for THE DRAGON MURDER CASE (1933), which was used for the cover of the PICTORIAL REVIEW serialization; the Scribner’s first edition; the Grosset & Dunlap reprint — even the Spanish softcover translation.
And on that less-than-humble note, I’ll submit this for whatever it’s worth to you and your customers.
Cordially,
Ray