Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Remember the Night
1940 · Mitchell Leisen · Remember the Night on Sightlines
Start inside the car. Two people sit side by side on the front seat, both faces lit so we can read them clearly, while behind them a road slides past on a screen. That road is a rear-projection plate, a studio convenience of 1940, and you can tell. It doesn't matter. Mitchell Leisen and his cameraman Ted Tetzlaff have built a small lit room and set it moving, and in that room an assistant district attorney and the shoplifter he was trying to keep in jail start, slowly, to talk.
How they got there is a lawyer's trick. John Sargent (Fred MacMurray) knows a jury in Christmas week will go easy on a pretty defendant, so he gets Lee Leander's trial (Barbara Stanwyck) postponed. Then it bothers him that she will spend the holiday in a cell. He posts her bail, and through a run of accidents and impulses he ends up driving her from New York home to Indiana, where they both come from. The plot is simple. The film's real question is the one Preston Sturges's script keeps asking: is a person made by where she comes from and who loves her, or is her character fixed?
Gilles Deleuze gives us useful words for that question, even though this is about as classical as Hollywood gets. He calls this kind of filmmaking the movement-image: people take in a situation and act on it, actions lead to consequences, and the cutting serves that chain. In its biggest version, which he calls the large form, there is a milieu, meaning a whole surrounding world of places, habits and pressures. He names that surrounding world the encompasser. It presses on a character until she acts and changes it. Westerns and gangster films follow this pattern. Remember the Night uses it in a gentler key, and that's the source of its charm. The milieu here is a household, and the character it works on is mostly being changed by it rather than changing it.
That's why Leisen's houses matter so much. Before he directed he designed sets and costumes, including for Cecil B. DeMille, and he thinks with rooms. The film sets two homes against each other. Lee's mother's house is a bare, cold interior where nothing gives. The Sargent farmhouse is crowded and covered in ornaments, full of people doing things: John's mother (Beulah Bondi), Aunt Emma (Elizabeth Patterson), the hired man Willie (Sterling Holloway). There's cooking, decorating, songs at the piano. Deleuze has a word for the bond that runs both ways between a setting and a person, each stamping the other: the imprint. In a gangster picture the imprint is a scar. Here it works more like a thaw. Nobody tells Lee she belongs. The house just keeps giving her things to do, and the film watches how she takes it.
That watching is where Stanwyck comes in, and where a second Deleuzian idea earns its place. Deleuze calls the close-up an affection-image: a feeling registered on a face before it turns into action. He separates the face that holds one still quality from the face where tiny movements build toward a threshold. The second kind he calls a potisign, an icon of power. Stanwyck plays the second kind. Lee is quick and hard, braced to be turned away, and her performance lives in small recalibrations when warmth arrives where she expected rejection. You can see her deciding whether to trust it. The farmhouse scenes are paced to leave room for this. Doane Harrison's editing lets moments go on, and the camera holds the performance in the frame instead of chopping it up. The action stays in suspense on her face, and that suspense is the drama.
Put those two ideas together and the film's design comes into view. The milieu works on the person, the face shows the change, and the change becomes the next situation. Sturges wrote a debate about nature and nurture. Leisen staged it as a sequence of rooms. Through it all, the car, that moving chamber against the process plate, serves as the in-between room where the two of them are neither prosecutor and defendant nor anything else yet.
The roots of all this are easy to trace. It Happened One Night (1934) built the chassis: two mismatched travelers forced into a series of temporary homes, where closeness grows out of shared confinement rather than declarations. Trouble in Paradise (1932), Lubitsch's Paramount model of sophisticated comedy, taught him décor-driven staging and elegant ellipsis. Hands Across the Table (1935) had already paired him with MacMurray and fixed his habit of building romance through behavior in furnished rooms. Easy Living (1937) set up the divided authorship you feel here, with Sturges's talk and odd bit players passed through Leisen's protective, design-first hand. Midnight (1939) showed the skill this film depends on: sliding a scene from wisecrack to real feeling with no visible seam. Behind Stanwyck's Lee stands Baby Face (1933), whose fallen woman was hard because of what had been done to her. Remember the Night takes that idea and asks, gently, what kindness might do instead.
The film's descendants are even more striking. This was the last script Sturges wrote for someone else to direct. His frustration with how directors cut his pages pushed him to take the chair himself, and that same year he made The Great McGinty. Critics who argue about who the "author" of a film is could hardly find a cleaner case: here is the hinge where a writer became a director. Four years later Stanwyck and MacMurray met again as the murderous lovers of Double Indemnity, and part of that film's shock is the memory of how easy and teasing they are here. Harrison went on to become Billy Wilder's trusted editor. Tetzlaff shot Notorious for Hitchcock.
So what does a modest Paramount holiday picture add to film as an art? It shows that the classical action-image could do something besides conflict. Hollywood's machinery for setting a milieu against a character could be turned toward tenderness. Then the milieu becomes a place that teaches someone how to belong, and the drama sits in the delay between being offered something and accepting it. Leisen's contribution is the seamless slide between tones, which keeps a courtroom comedy, a road picture and a homecoming in one coherent world.
When you watch it, watch the rooms. Notice which ones give Lee something to do and which ones leave her standing still. Then watch Stanwyck's face for the moment just before she lets herself accept it. That moment comes back again and again, a little different each time, and the whole film is built out of it.
Concepts in play
- the movement-image — A fully classical Paramount construction: Sargent's courtroom maneuver sets off a chain of causes (bail, the drive, the homecomings), with invisible, performance-serving continuity
- the encompasser (synsign) — The two households, the bare, unforgiving home of Lee's mother and the crowded Sargent farmhouse at Christmas, act as whole milieus that put pressure on the characters, staging Sturges's environment-versus-character debate
- the imprint (empreinte) — Leisen stages the Sargent household around rituals (cooking, decorating, songs at the piano) so that Lee is reshaped by taking part in the milieu rather than by explanatory dialogue
- icon of power (potisign) — Stanwyck's performance lives in small recalibrations of a self-protective face when warmth is offered instead of rejection, given room by Harrison's unhurried cutting and Tetzlaff's sustained framing
- the closed set (cadre) — The rear-projection car interiors: a lit, enclosed two-shot chamber with both faces kept legible while the road unspools on the process plate behind them