ThedevilChoose
When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.
Verity Robins
Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.
Justina
The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.
MartinHafer
It's a very strange thing when you watch many films from the 1930s. Although the Depression hit everyone very hard and unemployment hovered around 30%, you sure wouldn't think this was the case when you watch most Hollywood films today. Many of them featured happy- go-lucky rich folks cavorting about...as if it was the best of all possible times. Most featured middle-class folks. And, oddly, few films featured the poor...despite MOST people being so very poor! Now I do understand that Hollywood was trying to sell optimism and folks wanted escapism but sometimes I find it hard to believe just how many obnoxious rich folks are the leading characters in many of the films. "My Man Godfrey" centered around a wacky but oddly likable rich family but other films, such as "Remember Last Night?", featured folks who were thoroughly detestable....and the sort of folks the populists of the era thoroughly hated. But not only the leftist...MOST folks watching the film would have thoroughly hated these spoiled rich jerks...and that must have made this film a very hard picture to sell to the general public.When the film begins, a young couple, Tony and Carlotta (Robert Young and Constance Cummings) are invited out for a riotous party with their rich and worthless friends. The party consists of the folks dressing up like black people* and slumming it as well as making a lot of noise and then running amok--driving drunk and incredibly recklessly as well. By the time the evening is over, any sane person would want to see the lot of them in prison! Fortunately, one good thing comes of it...when Tony and Carlotta awaken they discover one of these useless party-goers is dead. To make things worse, it turns out everyone was so wasted at the party that no one has any idea what happened the night before and the death is unexplainable. Soon a bright district attorney (Edward Arnold) and his addle-brained sidekick (Eddie Brophy) arrive to try to unravel the mystery. And, although they have no training whatsoever, Tony and Carlotta decide to try to help.Based on what I've said so far, it's not surprising when I say that a huge strike against the film are the rich folks. While I am very much a capitalist, these sort of folks are awful and it's hard to care at all about any of them. In fact, I found myself hoping that the murderer would strike a few more times!! I really think the writing was the problem---having the folks get drunk and not know what happened isn't a bad plot device. But having them all be so worthless and hateful is something that SHOULD have been softened in the script. So is the film watchable despite this serious problem? Well, on the positive side the cast is pretty good and the detective and his sidekick better than usual for a mystery film. And, when they aren't acting like spoiled, um...jerks, Young and Cummings are also pretty good. Plus, the film was directed by a competent director, James Whale of "Frankenstein" fame (which is funny as one of the lines in the film references the Bride of Frankenstein). But the script...well...it isn't terrible but isn't enough to overcome the premise about the spoiled rich brats. At times, it's pretty good--with some snappy dialog. At other times, unfortunately, it's overwrought and silly. As a result, I see it as a film that wastes some talent and should have been better had the characters been at least halfway likable and relateable. *While this scene might have offended just a few in the theaters in the 1930s, today it's enough to give most modern viewers coronaries! Yes, it IS in very bad taste and yes it IS very racist. While I love the good 'ol days, some things about them weren't so good...and it's a truly cringe-worthy part of the film.
kidboots
"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.
MARIO GAUCI
Despite its mixed critical reception and box-office failure (when it premiered at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood, a place which I passed on several occasions while I was there a few months ago), this is one of director James Whale's favorites among his own films. It's a cross between screwball comedy and murder mystery and plays almost like a zanier version of THE THIN MAN (1934).The first 20 minutes are totally insane depicting a wild society party in full bloom, where eternally tipsy socialites are seen sipping champagne through straws from a large bowl and knocking off trays full of glasses just for the hell of it - besides indulging in some very politically incorrect behavior by, among other things, continuously humiliating their uptight and openly contemptuous English butler and dancing around in blackface! The pacing sags here and there but, overall, it's a disarmingly hilarious concoction with a frenzied stream of verbal gags which is often hard to keep up with; in light of all this, the intricate plot with its many red herrings and variety of suspects (including a rather surprising villain) seems of secondary importance.Whale also cheekily inserts a couple of in-jokes (and at least one overtly gay reference) at the expense of his past horror output by name-dropping the likes of THE BLACK CAT (1934), BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935) and DRACULA'S DAUGHTER (1936). Interestingly enough, the film was shot very quickly during a delay in the start of production of Whale's subsequent film, SHOWBOAT (1936) - which had arisen so as to give time to Irene Dunne to finish shooting another major Universal production of the time, MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION (1935) - and, in the first place, Universal had only reluctantly greenlighted REMEMBER LAST NIGHT? once Whale had agreed to do DRACULA'S DAUGHTER in return (more on this later)!! The film is highlighted by a bizarre hypnosis sequence in which Prof. Karl Herman Eckhardt Jones (Gustav von Seyffertitz) attempts to induce the party guests to recall the events of the previous night because they're all too hungover to do it by themselves! The elaborate décor courtesy of top Hollywood set designer Charles D. Hall (including a life-size barge for a bar!) gives the film a visual stylishness strikingly akin to Whale's magnum opus BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN.REMEMBER LAST NIGHT boasts a sharp and witty script - co-written by Dan Totheroh of THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER (1941) fame - and a great cast of character actors with the delightful Constance Cummings - real-life wife of Whale's THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932) scriptwriter, Benn W. Levy - Edward Brophy (hilarious as a "reformed" safecracker turned amateur sleuth and busy body) and Arthur Treacher (the befuddled butler, of course) standing out in particular. It's also worth noting that Whale managed here to fill out his cast list with several other vintage horror regulars like the aforementioned Brophy and von Seyffertitz, Robert Armstrong and Rafaela Ottiano, not to mention his own fixture, E. E. Clive! Besides, there's also a priceless uncredited bit from frequent Laurel and Hardy foil, Tiny Sandford as a disgruntled truck driver.Sadly, this has only been the second (or is that third?) non-horror James Whale film I've watched (although I should be adding two more before long) but it does make you wonder whether the time has come for Universal to honor one of its most eminent past film-makers with a "James Whale Collection" DVD Box Set. All those in favor, raise their hands now!
dennisb-6
It's a wild party all right, with a lot of content that would curl the hair of the average movie- goer nowadays. While we in the 21st Century have been brutalized to boredom by the sight of a person's entrails being blown via shotgun blast onto the walls like some kind of macabre Rorshach, these folks would have been mortified at such a sight. But abuse people? While mid-party, even before the first piece of significant action, we are treated to profligate drinking, both individual and group (You have to see this to believe it.), impaired driving, racism (The most embarrassing and shamefacedly tacky minstrel-take-off I've ever seen!), vandalism, reckless endangerment, resisting arrest and dangerous driving.Notwithstanding, the movie is an instructive social exhibit of a time when, during the depth of the worst depression in history, these brutes marauded carelessly while the world burned around them. Never has a house staff been so clearly cast as in utter disgust of their employer's very existence.Overall, a terrific example of its time. Fun, too, even if it's darn near too nasty to live.
