Remember Last Night? (1935)

One of my all time favorites.

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Great Film overall

Good concept, poorly executed.

"Remember Last Night?" was billed as a sophisticated melodrama with laughs and boasted of four murders and an attempted suicide as a group of hard drinking socialites, after a wild night spent in an alcoholic haze find themselves involved in murder. It was lovely to see Constance Cummings really let her hair down as a wacky champagne drinking society girl and Robert Young, as always was at his dependable best, but to compare them to Nick and Nora Charles is laughable. The film had not much charm and while I am not familiar with James Whale's background, he seemed to be taking a satirical look at the idle rich but his direction really floundered. The only actors who seemed believable in their roles were Sally Eilers and Robert Armstrong as a sister and brother who had fought hard to shake off their shanty town background. And of course Arthur Treacher as the acidic tongued butler, whose tones dripped with sarcasm. Nick and Nora could fit in anywhere - from Park Avenue to Skid Row, Tony and Carlotta (Young and Cummings) seem caught in a time warp from the Roaring Twenties. I can't imagine this movie being at all popular with the average audience from the mid thirties for which the depression was still very real. Had James Whale lost touch with the movie going public??Tony and Carlotta wake up with a massive hangover to find their host dead. No one can really remember their movements and unfortunately things look bad for Tony - he was seen wandering around during the night with a knife and the chauffeur finds a blood stained rag in Tony's Bugatti. But everyone has a motive - the victim, Vic Huling (George Meeker), hadn't been particularly kind to his wife (Eilers) and their driver, Flannagan, (Armstrong) was getting pretty fed up about it. Vic had also been heavying Billy Arliss (as played by Monroe Owsley, he was just a hyped up bundle of nerves) for money he thought Billy owed him.Edward Arnold makes an appearance playing Edward Arnold, I mean police chief Danny Harrison but he could have been playing a racketeer for all the light and shade he gave the role. With him is Ed Brophy as surprise, surprise, a bumbling side kick. Tony enlists the aid of an eminent hypnotist (Gustav Von Seyffertitz) who is bought in to hypnotise each guest. "One of them was faking" he proclaims and is just about to announce the murderer when he is killed. Anyone familiar with programmers from the mid thirties will have no trouble picking the guilty party!!The liquor flows freely, surprisingly in a mid 1930s production - even at the end when Arnold chastizes them for drinking, stating "This is how this mess started in the first place", - the last shot of them is grabbing a bottle with the promise of "one last time". Constance Cummings was so much better in the 1940 "Busman's Holiday" with Robert Montgomery as Lord Peter Wimsey. Although she only appeared for less than a minute as Batiste's (Jack La Rue) not quite blind mother she made her part memorable.

Remember Last Night? (1935) ** 1/2 (out of 4) Above average whodunit from director James Whale about a group of rich people who drink the night away and then the next morning one of them has been shot to death. The only problem is that they were so drunk none of them can remember a thing. This is probably the weakest Whale film I've seen to date but there are a few interesting moments but the humor really lets the film down. The actually mystery is pretty good and remains interesting up until the very end. The biggest problem is the humor, which is flat from the start and never picks up. There's an outrageous blackface dance number, which has to be seen to be believed. The cast are all strong but it's Robert Armstrong who steals the show. On a side note I already knew about the joke to Bride of Frankenstein but was caught off guard to the joke about Dracula's Daughter, which Whale was suppose to direct the following year but backed out.

When a man is found murdered after a night of carousing, a husband and wife set out to solve the crime in "Remember Last Night," a 1935 film directed by James Whale and starring Robert Young and Constance Cummings. They certainly did a lot of partying in the '30s, but the partying in this film is on a new level. Everyone is so drunk that the next morning, no one can remember a thing about what happened the night before and how one of their friends ended up dead."Remember Last Night" is along the lines of the Thin Man (with more booze, if you can believe it), "Fast and Loose," "Star of Midnight," etc. - the lighthearted man-woman crime-solving genre so popular in the '30s. What sets this one apart is the shameless drunkenness, which raises drinking to a new art form, and an appalling display of people wearing blackface masks and talking jive in one part of the movie.Constance Cummings and Robert Young play the couple, and they're delightful. Cummings is beautiful, sophisticated, and sparkles as the wife. An accomplished stage actress who lived to be 95, Cummings appeared as Mary Tyrone to Olivier's James in an acclaimed "Long Day's Journey into Night" and in her seventies toured the country in "Wings," about a stroke victim. Here she is young and dazzling. Robert Young does very well in a role normally played by Robert Montgomery or William Powell - he's younger, and gives the part just the right playful touch. He lived to be 91, so maybe there was something in whatever passed for booze in the movie. Edward Arnold, Reginald Denny, and Arthur Treacher provide solid support.This is a somewhat convoluted mystery - it was hard to follow even being sober, so just think what the characters went through. If you can get into the spirit of it (pardon the pun), it's fun, and as well, it's a great commentary on the times - and how they have changed.

This film seems to be an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the Thin Man, which came out the previous year, and while Young and Cummings are fine, they can't match either the urbanity or the chemistry of Powell and Loy. The acting is generally top-notch, although Sally Eilers' overwrought hysteria becomes really grating after awhile.The drinking here seems more witless and reckless than in the Thin Man; at one point speeding drunken driver Young barely misses being flattened by a train, resulting in general hilarity among his passengers. Several times he is shown going 90 mph while plastered, once with a police detective as a passenger! All very cute in 1935, I guess.There's a lot of amusing 30's banter, especially in the early part of the film. The plot is of the usual type for a murder mystery of the period, with the suspects gathered in the drawing room, and the announcement of the murderer's name, although there are some twists. I did think it was just a little bit too much to believe when the detective allowed the apparently guilty party to get a smoke from their own cigarette box--resulting in silly, cheap theatrics that added nothing to the plot.