Remember Last Night? (Universal, 1935)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next film in James Whale’s canon after The Bride of Frankenstein was, as Monty Python would have said, something completely different: Remember Last Night?, a savagely brilliant screwball comedy based on a novel by Adam Hobhouse (one online source says that was a pseudonym but doesn’t say who it was a pseudonym for) called The Hangover Murders. It’s about a rich young couple, Tony and Carlotta Milburn (Robert Young and Constance Cummings), who as the film opens are celebrating their six-months’ wedding anniversary (the people in this film couple, uncouple and recouple with so much abandon that holding a marriage together for six whole months is a major accomplishment) by having a constant party, which begins at the Milburns’ home and stretches to several other locations before finally ending up at a roadhouse named Faronea’s, whose owner, Faronea (Gregory Ratoff) is a Greek posing as a Russian to run an Italian restaurant. Along the way the characters drink, clown, drink, flirt with each other, drink, drink and drink a lot more – and one thing that dates this movie is they travel from one place to another by car with no apparent concern about being busted for DUI.

In fact they have no particular concern about anything until the next morning, when Tony wakes up from a bad dream to find a blood-stained rag in his fancy Bugatti phaeton (as in other movies of the period, including the 1925 silent World War I film The Big Parade, his driving a car with the steering wheel on the right side, in the European style, shows his affluence and also his snobbishness). Carlotta and some of the other characters also wake up and eventually they discover that one of the partiers, Vic Huling (George Meeker), is dead from a gunshot wound. The gimmick is that none of the partiers can remember anything about the night of the murder (hence the title) and therefore can’t say for certain that any of them aren’t the killer. Among the prime suspects are Vic’s wife Bette, pronounced “Bett” (Sally Eilers) – who spent the night of her husband’s murder in bed with another man, though the implication is that they were both too drunk to do any physical cheating – Jake Whitridge (Reginald Denny), Penny Whitaker (Louise Henry), Billy Arliss (Monroe Owsley) and Fred Flannagan (Robert Armstrong, wasted as usual – why starring in the 1933 film King Kong and its sequel, Son of Kong, didn’t win this ballsy actor stardom in leading roles remains a mystery to me), Vic Huling’s former chauffeur until he fired him for unclear reasons on the eve of his murder. Also Faronea is himself in league with a crook, Baptiste (Jack LaRue), to kidnap Vic Huling and hold him for ransom in the basement of the restaurant – only Vic’s death short-circuits the plan and leaves Baptiste futilely demanding to get paid anyway even though the crime isn’t going to happen after all.

The opening scene is sheer delight as the characters not only drink to their heart’s content but don’t seem to have a clue that glasses can be saved and reused; as I joked the first time Charles and I saw this film, they seem to be keeping at least three glassware companies in business all by themselves. Remember Last Night? is full of in-joke references to Universal’s horror films; at one point a woman descending into the cellar at Faronea’s declaims, “I feel like the bride of Frankenstein!,” and in a flashback detailing what little of the opening party the characters do remember about last night, Carlotta is shown at the end of the diving board of their swimming pool, wrapping a beach towel around herself like a cape and saying, “I’m Dracula’s daughter!” (James Whale had originally been assigned to direct Dracula’s Daughter, with Bela Lugosi repeating his vampire role from the original film, but in the end veteran silent-film director Lambert Hillyer took over the assignment and the script was rewritten so Dracula the father didn’t appear at all.) The high/low point of the opening sequence is when the characters announce that they are going to serve “soup” – which turns out, of course, to be a giant ceramic bowl of champagne. They pour several bottles of the stuff into the bowl, use straws to drink it, and when they’re finished they, of course, break the bowl. (One wonders what their household staff – the only member of which we see is Clarence Phelps, played by the driest of all dry Hollywood butler types, Arthur Treacher, who later launched a chain of restaurants and boasted that he’d made so much money playing butlers he could afford a butler of his own – think of all the broken glass and crockery they continually have to clean up.)

Also involved in the action is a mad hypnotist named Smith (Gustav von Seyffertitz, with a long career in villainy highlighted to playing Professor Moriarty to John Barrymore’s Sherlock Holmes in 1922) who offers to hypnotize the various guests at the dinner party to see if he can hypnotize the guests whose memories have been drowned in seas of alcohol and extract the information about who killed Vic Huling. He hypnotizes Tony Milburn with a macabre spinning wheel, and Whale cuts back and forth between the hypnotist and the shadows of the wheel revolving across Tony’s face – a haunting scene that would have worked in a Whale horror film just as one could readily imagine Von Seyffertitz as Dr. Praetorius in The Bride of Frankenstein if Ernest Thesiger hadn’t played him even better. In any case, Whale and his writing committee – Harry Clork, Doug Malloy and Dan Totheroh, the last a name from my childhood because for decades he supervised, and often wrote, the annual plays performed in the natural outdoor amphitheatre on Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California, where I grew up – manage at once to exploit and make fun of the old cliché of having Smith announce, “The murderer is … ” – and then get killed himself just before he says the name.

The cops in this one are Inspector Danny Harrison (Edward Arnold, top-billed) and his dumb sidekick Maxie (Ed Brophy, whom we’d just seen in a different context in Olsen and Johnson’s See My Lawyer from 10 years later, and who was a good enough slapstick comedian he could hold his own in films with Buster Keaton and the Three Stooges), who manages to burst in just in time to keep Danny and anyone else from being killed when the real murderer is at last exposed. Whale for the most part directs this film with a sure hand – as I’ve noted in previous entries as Charles and I have worked our way through Whale’s filmography, he had worked in a variety of genres as a stage director and continued to do that as a filmmaker, going from screwball comedy in By Candlelight to romantic melodrama in One More River to horror in The Bride of Frankenstein and back to screwball in Remember Last Night? About the only directorial mistake Whale made in this one is he let Edward Arnold overact relentlessly, as if Arnold were warming up for his relentless (and utterly humorless) pursuit of Peter Lorre in Josef von Sternberg’s 1935 film of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Arnold’s very next credit. Somehow Frank Capra could cast Arnold in film after film (You Can’t Take It With You, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe) as the villainous exponent of everything wrong with capitalism and get chillingly underplayed performances out of him, while Whale let him loose to do beaver imitations on the scenery in a part in which he’s supposed to be sympathetic. He does get a nice finale in which, the mystery wrapped up and the killer gone to jail (we learn who it was but the motive remains pretty mysterious), he strongly urges Tony and Carlotta to stop drinking – and they agree, then down shot glasses of something or other the moment his back is turned. It did occur to me that they could have made a sequel in which Tony and Carlotta join Alcoholics Anonymous – and then have to solve the murder of one of the members of their AA group.

Remember Last Night? was obviously inspired by the success of MGM’s The Thin Man the year before, also about a well-heeled couple who get involved in a murder mystery while dirnking a lot – though Whale had a good deal of trouble with the Production Code Administration over the sheer amount of imbibing in the story and wished he could have made his movie a year earlier, when Woody Van Dyke had directed The Thin Man, before the pressure from groups like the Roman Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency (that name says it all!) had pressured the Hollywood establishment to tighten enforcement of the Production Code. But even with tighter enforcement, Whale nonetheless ramped up the whole concept and took it to delightfully absurd heights, creating a gem of a film that deserves to be considerably better known. In fact, when Universal Home Video made a big to-do over the rediscovery and reissue of the 1940 Paramount farce comedy Remember the Night, despite my admiration for that film’s female lead, Barbara Stanwyck (playing a shoplifter who gets mixed up with prosecutor Fred MacMurray in the first of their four films together), I wished they had given that treatment to Remember Last Night? instead.

And when Universal issued a boxed set of four films on DVD and called it Universal Rarities even though all the movies in it were Paramount productions (MCA had bought the 1929-1949 Paramount catalog for TV sales in the 1950’s and then assigned it to Universal when MCA bought the studio in 1962), I found myself hoping in vain that they’d do a Universal Rarities, Volume 2 consisting of rare and unjustly neglected films Universal itself had produced: James Whale’s The Kiss Before the Mirror and Remember Last Night?, Hobart Henley’s Night World (a fascinating hour-long “B” from 1932 centered around a nightclub with Boris Karloff as its manager and Busby Berkeley doing a number representing its floor show – two names you don’t expect to see on the credits of the same movie), Edward Ludwig’s 1934 The Man Who Reclaimed His Head (a marvelous anti-war parable set in pre-World War I France with Claude Rains as an anti-war editor and Lionel Atwill as his pro-war publisher, and an unforgettably macabre ending). Karl Freund’s 1934 Gift of Gab (mostly a comedy-musical about radio but with a scene between Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, playing themselves), and John Hoffman’s 1945 The Crimson Canary, oddly billed when first released as an exploitation film (the original poster art said, “Rhythm Cults Exposed!”) but really a first-rate murder mystery about a jazz trumpeter unjustly accused of murdering his band’s singer.