Remember the Night from 1940 fits neatly in that final category. It's a charming (on paper, at least) tale invoking themes typical of holiday films, such as redemption and going home and remembering one's humble roots. It checks the box for what some are looking for in a holiday film (no Die Hard-style debate needed here). How about for a comedy? It's not particularly funny. Romance? I suppose, but a great deal of suspension of disbelief is required.
Bear with me, because the plot is a bit on the far-fetched side: Barbara Stanwyck plays Lee Leander, a woman who is arrested for stealing a bracelet from a jewelry store in New York City. The assistant district attorney, Jack Sargent (Fred MacMurray), is assigned the case representing the state. Even though it seems to be a case of petty theft in which any jury would find her guilty, Jack, in an effort to avoid the jury's potential feelings of Christmas redemption, he manages to push the trial until past the holiday on a technicality.
Unfortunately for Lee, this means she'll certainly be spending the holiday in jail. Feeling bad for her, Jack asks a bail bondsman to post bail for her. Assuming this means he's into her, the bondsman drops her off at his place. For a variety of reasons, she can't stay with him, but as luck would have it, they're both Hoosiers, and Jack offers Lee a ride to Indiana on his way home for Christmas. From here, one can predict what likely will happen: opposites attract, and despite their conflict, maybe they start to fall for each other.
It sort of reaches its peak in terms of rom-com sentiment when Jack and Lee try their best to milk a cow on the property they spent the night in (unsuccessfully). It's around this moment that the film really starts to feel like a wannabe version of It Happened One Night, released six years before—a mismatched guy and gal trying to find their way from the city and experiencing a few hiccups along the way. It is at least evident, though, that from these moments on, Stanwyck and MacMurray really have swell chemistry together. (MacMurray even gets a moment to sing.) And I suppose I was rooting for them along the way as I was supposed to. This was the first of four pairings of Stanwyck and MacMurray, though their most famous film together was, of course, the film noir Double Indemnity four years later. Double Indemnity is the clearly superior outing.
The humor will almost certainly fall flat for many modern audiences. Maybe the lines were funny to a 1940s audiences (a line like "I hope he isn't going to sing it," quipped by Jack in court to his fellow lawyer to mock his opponent) and potentially provoked at least chuckling from contemporary moviegoers. Even if it did, it's unclear how such a pun could alleviate the assured boredom that would result in the long-winded courtroom defense by the lawyer portrayed by Willard Robertson. I haven't even said anything about the cringey racial politics in the scenes between Jack and his servant, Rufus (played by Fred "Snowflake" Toones), most of which was meant to be comical.
Remember the Night (which night by the way?) is a movie I really wanted to like. I wanted to add it to my list of holiday must-sees. The older I get, the more I'm willing to accept Die Hard and maybe even Little Women as Christmas films. Remember the Night is more explicitly Christmas than those two films, but considerably less recommendable.
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