Sightlines · reception

How Remember the Night was received

1940 · Mitchell Leisen · Remember the Night on Sightlines

The arc

A solid hit in January 1940, then quietly overshadowed for decades — partly because Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder spent years trashing director Mitchell Leisen's reputation. TCM airings and a long-overdue 2010 DVD release turned it into cinephiles' favorite 'secret' Christmas movie, and Leisen's stock has been climbing ever since.

What’s debated

The perennial fight is over credit: is this Sturges's movie that Leisen merely (and allegedly) softened, or proof that Leisen was a far better director than Sturges's disciples ever admitted?

Its footprint

It lives as the great alternative Christmas movie — the one film buffs recommend every December when everyone else says It's a Wonderful Life — and as the warm-hearted flip side of Stanwyck and MacMurray's murderous reunion in Double Indemnity.

Where it stands

Beloved-but-underseen: a 'you must see this' handshake among classic-Hollywood fans and a reliable entry on Letterboxd's best-Christmas-movies lists.

Did you know? This was the last screenplay Preston Sturges wrote for another director before Paramount let him direct his own scripts — and it's the first of four films pairing Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, four years before Double Indemnity.