"How long since you've been home?"
Noir and romcoms aren’t so far apart.
Plenty of noir involves romance and hilarity; sometimes a bleak ending the only thing firmly grounding any given film as the ‘darker’ genre.
One of the wittiest romcoms of all is His Girl Friday, with its funny twist on a femme fatale (hint, it’s not Rosalind Russell), a plot centring the death penalty, featuring The Establishment pushing a woman towards suicide.
Few romcoms are as consistently delightful, unabashedly sexy, and outright hilarious as quintessential noir The Thin Man.
It’s a Wonderful Life is indeed a romcom and a noir — Christmas setting makes it one of the closest comps to Remember the Night, which came out six years prior, in 1940.
Remember the Night never does more than feint towards noir, almost stubbornly (studio-required-ly?) returning to moral messaging as the central couple romance each other with more slapstick than malfeasance.
But noir drifts through nonetheless.
Maybe my lenses are smoke-coloured from seeing Double Indemnity many times before Remember the Night, but Stanwyck and MacMurray’s chemistry carries a more sensual* undercurrent than most romcoms, foreshadowing their immortal darkest-noir turn four years later.
*Any romcom characters worth their salt need or have had each other in the biblical sense, but this is sensual, as opposed to sexual; don’t ask me to parse the difference, you have to feel it out.
Other than her blonde hair for Double Indemnity (which Wilder said after the fact was a huge mistake), either of these stills could work for both films.
Their sensual undercurrent is subtext to the borderline dangerous text of their ‘meet cute,’ when MacMurray’s lawyer Jack is roped into defending Stanwyck’s Lee on theft charges.
Not only are we never in doubt Lee committed the theft, she’s belligerently defensive about it. She serves Jack a pro-theft, ‘poor people shouldn’t just be able to steal bread, but four-course meals’ diatribe which would probably have been censored out of even a noir within a decade, as McCarthyism tightened the Hays Code’s looser strings.
Along with anti-fat-cat sentiment, writer Preston Sturges packed the script with drama, schmaltz, and as strong insinuations of sex as he could; for example a subtle slam on the size of Jack’s hands, after which it’s made clear Lee doesn’t care about their span, only how he uses them.
Sturges said he wanted the film to have pain, grief, and moral ambiguity, the main concept being "Love reformed her and corrupted him." Those noir edges are some of my favourite bits — including Lee’s bitter mother refusing to change, Jack’s ethics bending then breaking, and the (somewhat, fight me) equivocal ending.
Which leads us to the scene which gives this piece’s title; even set amongst the more melodramatic ‘lounge singer delivers on the nose song’ setting, this exchange has noir in spades
The lines “How long since you've been home?" "Never." would be at home in any hardboiled film. Part of Stanwyck’s magic saying it so offhandedly while imbuing it with a past full of pain. Watch her left hand resist clenching Jack’s shoulder, then remains restless as she answers his follow-up question; a tiny tic which speaks to how hard Lee is working to keep a cool facade until she can escape to the table.
Jack follows, and to his everlasting credit doesn’t force eye contact, doesn’t dig further into her psychic wound, but instead makes an offer, giving Lee an ‘out’ literally and metaphorically.
While Lee does happily use Jack’s softness to her own ends, including blatantly manipulating him into bailing her out, crucially here she’s neither lying nor leveraging, but displaying unexpected vulnerability he doesn’t take advantage of. It’s the part of her actual self she usually hides beneath her just-as-actual causticness which inspires Jack’s genuine offer of a (literal) free ride. This offer also comes from a genuine place, usually veneered over by the ‘tough guy lawyer’ act he puts on in court, but which falls away in Lee’s presence.
Lee’s genuine reveal followed by Jack refusing to poke harder into her ripped-open scar are two subtle nudges away from noir into romance, and the film embracing and rewarding the heartfelt from both of them cements its genres.
When writing and living, keep in mind the true message of Remember the Night; every romance (and most comedies) is made better when it embraces the darkness along with the light.