A Night to Remember (1942)

Sadly Over-hyped

Fresh and Exciting

Don't listen to the negative reviews

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Wise-cracking cab-drivers who say "Thank you" for a 75-cents fare and gum-chewing waitresses bringing customers the $1.25 specials in a stable-themed Greenwich Village restaurant are clues that tell you that you're in the movieland of the '40s. "A Night to Remember" is a screwball comedy/murder mystery made for a tired audience looking for not much more than a 90-minute break from war news. They got their quarter's worth. The leads are young and beguiling; the plot is nicely knotty; the dialogue is fast and furious; the humor is basic and wholesome; the styles, quaint though they may be to our jaundiced eyes, are up-to-the-minute (more fedoras than at a hat-makers convention; and most of the men sport identical little moustaches, making them at times indistinguishable); and the pratfalls are frequent and farcical. But there's something more going on here.The sun never seems to shine on narrow and twisting Gay Street in Gotham's Greenwich Village, at least at No. 13 - a dark and brooding walkup brownstone where every apartment apparently comes with hot and cold running terror and a corpse next door. At least that what Brian Aherne and Loretta Young, as an attractive young couple just looking for a nice place to live, are about to find out in "A Night to Remember."...which offers up a scream about every three minutes. In this rowdy comedy mystery, the body count gets higher while the laughs keep adding up. Aherne and Young, as an addled and rattled husband and wife, can't even turn around in their apartment without something or somebody sinister dropping in. Brian Aherne, a mystery novelist without a clue, and a stunning Loretta Young, who gets frightened very easily and shrieks rather nicely, have to pick their way through very menacing goings-on before they can settle in. But they find very quickly that they can't trust anybody in their new home, where your neighbor might well be as disturbing as a creaking floorboard at midnight or as quiet as somebody (or something) breathing heavily outside your door. What's worse is that a grumpy police inspector, played here by Sidney Toler (don't expect any quaint sayings), trusts neither Aherne nor Young.As the young couple quickly discover, there are a great many secrets in this strange house, and the unnerving characters (played by a virtual graveyard shift of talented performers, including Jeff Donnell, Lee Patrick, Blanche Yurka and Gale Sondergaard) who show up at odd places and odd times aren't the sort of folks who share."A Night to Remember" may be forgettable, but it definitely is watchable and enjoyable. Director Richard Wallace keeps the suspense dialed on high. And veteran cinematographer Joseph Walker has a way of making a banister or a backyard or even a bathtub look like something from "House Baleful." (Forget about film noir. This is film dire!)Bonus: Look for Brian Aherne's hilarious misadventures in a treacherous kitchen, where even an ordinary oven can turn into The Fiery Fiend From Hell. As you'll find out with delight, stalwart but suave Brian Aherne (some called him "the poor man's Errol Flynn") actually had a surprising gift for slapstick! And Loretta's later reputation for a sweet elegance is foreshadowed here. (No calm serenity here, though. That would come later.) Already a 25-year veteran of the movies, with more than EIGHTY films under her belt, the 30-year-old beauty easily matches Aherne for double takes and popped eyes and flapping hands and frozen stares and stammered warnings. And she's definitely a far better screamer.

In this quaint, serviceable comedy, a mystery writer and his wife move into a basement apartment at 13 Gay Street in Greenwich Village. The whole house has a sinister air and the other tenants seem hostile and frightened. The discovery of a murdered body outside the couple's back door doesn't help the atmosphere.What this film really is is a knock-off of the popular 'Thin Man' series starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. 'A Night to Remember' tries to reproduce the witty banter and screwball crime solving done so wonderfully in those films, and it is only somewhat successful.Young and Aherne have good chemistry, and the supporting actors are all game, but most of the humor is forced, and the mystery, taking a backseat to the comic antics, is only somewhat intriguing and borders on implausible. The cinematography is pretty good, making the dark shadows of the apartment sinister, but the entire production reeks from budget constraints and looks cheap.If you've seen the brilliant first three 'Thin Man' films, don't bother with this one. You've already seen the best and you'll be disappointed here. However, if you haven't seen them yet, check this out, and then rent 'The Thin Man' movies and you'll appreciate them so much more.

Night to Remember, A (1942) *** (out of 4)Pretty entertaining mystery/comedy has a wife (Loretta Young) renting a basement apartment so that her mystery writing husband (Brian Aherne) can get some inspirations. They gets a lot more than that when they discover a dead body in their back yard and the husband is the main suspect. This film has a lot of people ranking it as one of the best of the genre but I think that's a tad bit too much praise for it even though it's still a pretty good little movie. The film starts off on a quick pace but I found the screenplay started to drag as it went along and one could also say the film is the tale of two halves as the first part tries to do comedy with the second focusing more on the actual mystery. The two really don't mix well together because the comedy in the first half is so over the top that you really don't pay too much attention to solving the mystery and then when that becomes the main focus, you have to ask yourself what was up with the type of comedy they were going after. Just take a look at the scenes following the body being discovered. We get both Young and Aherne fainting because they think the other is the dead person. Fine, it gets a laugh but it's also so over the top that you're really not building any mystery up nor do you care. How many "old dark house" movies has someone laid a candle down only to have it move? Well here we get that again but a pretty fun reason for it moving. With that type of laugh it's hard to get the "drama" to work a split second later. I personally think the two genres can mix quite well, just look at HOLD THAT GHOST, but it doesn't work well here. Both Young and Aherne turn in good performance but I think you can look at them and see that they're trying to force several of the jokes. The supporting players include the then Charlie Chan himself Sidney Toler, Lee Patrick and Gale Sondergaard. Fans of the genre or the cast will certainly want to check this out but it's not nearly as good as some would have you believe.

This is available on DVD as part of Sony's "Icons of Screwball Comedy" series. I like Loretta Young, but she is certainly no "icon" of the genre, nor can this movie even be described as a "Screwball Comedy." Perhaps my disappointment in the film was based on faulty expectations. It's just a B picture from Columbia, clearly made on a shoestring budget, and what comedy there is in the film is pretty forced and obvious, exemplified by a tedious gag in which Brian Aherne has trouble opening a door. The plot -- a couple move into a building where a murderer lives -- was more entertaining when the Three Stooges did it. Even the solution to the mystery is forgettable. Young and Aherne are okay, but have nowhere near the chemistry of William Powell and Myrna Loy in their many films together. I'll give props to the cinematography: there is some fine work with limited light which, in some scenes, disguise the stage-bound nature of the film. Bottom line: this one's not worth your time.