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Dec 23, 2022

The movies we discussed for our 2022 Christmas Special Subject are a little on the dark side, as all great Christmas movies are, but these ones perhaps more obviously than ever. We paired Mitchell Leisen's Remember the Night (1940), with a screenplay by Preston Sturges, with William Dieterle's I'll Be Seeing You (1944), two movies about women who've fallen afoul of the law, and whose experience of falling out of step with society is contrasted with the comforts that bourgeois family life can offer. We zero in on the complexity of Barbara Stanwyck's relationship with her own morality in Remember the Night and the relationship that develops between Ginger Rogers and Joseph Cotten's traumatized soldier, who struggles with a different kind of alienation, in I'll Be Seeing You. We also discuss the way that the two movies associate the holiday season and spirit with the material and emotional comforts of bourgeois family life even while showing that the empathy fostered by the latter has limitations. 

Time Codes:

0h 1m 00s:        REMEMBER THE NIGHT (1940) [dir. Mitchell Leisen]

0h 46m 37s:      I’LL BE SEEING YOU (1944) [dir. William Dieterle]

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* Listen to our guest episode on The Criterion Project – a discussion of Late Spring

* Marvel at our meticulously ridiculous Complete Viewing Schedule for the 2020s

* Intro Song: “Sunday” by Jean Goldkette Orchestra with the Keller Sisters (courtesy of The Internet Archive)

* Read Elise’s piece on Gangs of New York “Making America Strange Again”

* Check out Dave’s Robert Benchley blog – an attempt to annotate and reflect upon as many of the master humorist’s 2000+ pieces as he can locate – Benchley Data: A Wayward Annotation Project! 

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