A Night to Remember

1942 "Startling in Mystery and Laughs!"
6.6| 1h28m| NR| en| More Info
Released: 10 December 1942 Released
Producted By: Columbia Pictures
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Budget: 0
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A woman rents a gloomy basement apartment in Greenwich Village thinking it will provide the perfect atmosphere for her mystery writer husband to create his next book. They soon find themselves in the middle of a real-life mystery when a corpse turns up in their apartment.

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Director

Richard Wallace

Production Companies

Columbia Pictures

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A Night to Remember Audience Reviews

Cubussoli Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!
Sexylocher Masterful Movie
MusicChat It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.
Glucedee It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.
grainstorms 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.
JohnHowardReid This is one of those comedy/mysteries or mystery/comedies that succeed in being neither particularly mysterious nor particularly comic. Actually, so far as the mystery is concerned, the scriptwriters make little effort to work up any suspense at all as to the actual identity of the killer. Indeed, this movie is more a straight thriller than a puzzling who-dun-it, but it must be admitted that some of the sequences do have a fair amount of excitement, aided by Joseph Walker's atmospheric photography and the setting itself. Unfortunately, as for the characters themselves, they remain from first to last as rather ambiguous figures – and this criticism applies even to the principals, Loretta Young and Brian Aherne. Loretta looks a bit less emaciated than usual and plays with her usual, sweetly smiling competence. Brian's approach to his characterization is shallow and rather superficial. He remains – like most of the supporting players – as a mere stock figure, and not a particularly sympathetic one at that! Like many of the screen's amateur detectives, he assumes an always-attempt-to-be- witty, devil-may-care attitude, but fails to back it up with the kind of brawny derring-do that audiences like. Even in the movie's most dramatic moments, he remains a clown. Of course, Aherne was doubtless limited by the script – as are the support players like Sidney Toler and Donald MacBride who play comic policemen. Actually, Toler and MacBride are a bit more successful than Aherne. Gale Sondergaard is also on hand, but has only the one scene. Blanche Yurka looks delightfully sinister. William Wright as Carstairs does a lot of talking, but it's uninteresting talk. Jeff Donnell has a promising part, but it develops in a disappointingly routine fashion. The direction was in the hands of Richard Wallace, a dull but competent director who made a career handling movies that were halfway between "A" and "B". His best of his sixty-one films, in my opinion, was Sinbad, the Sailor (1947). He also did good work on The Fallen Sparrow (1943), although I must admit that most people don't like that movie, despite its great cast: John Garfield, Maureen O'Hara, Walter Slezak.
Michael_Elliott 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.
andy1066 I have really enjoyed watching this fun murder mystery with Loretta Young and Brian Ahern. Not high drama or suspense but more a of comedy murder mystery. From Hollywoods golden era and they just don't make them like this anymore. Loretta Young was always very watchable and this role is no exception. Brian Ahern had a comedic flair that comes through in this flick. The two of them are wonderful together and the husband and wife banter is delightful. The rest of the cast includes some of Hollywoods best character actors in solid support of the stars. It is just great fun to watch and these kind of films are, in my opinion, what made the Golden Era of motion pictures so great. Hope you all enjoy.