Wonderfully offbeat film!

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

In this quaint, serviceable comedy, a mystery writer and his wife move into a basement apartment at 13 Gay Street in Greenwich Village. The whole house has a sinister air and the other tenants seem hostile and frightened. The discovery of a murdered body outside the couple's back door doesn't help the atmosphere.What this film really is is a knock-off of the popular 'Thin Man' series starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. 'A Night to Remember' tries to reproduce the witty banter and screwball crime solving done so wonderfully in those films, and it is only somewhat successful.Young and Aherne have good chemistry, and the supporting actors are all game, but most of the humor is forced, and the mystery, taking a backseat to the comic antics, is only somewhat intriguing and borders on implausible. The cinematography is pretty good, making the dark shadows of the apartment sinister, but the entire production reeks from budget constraints and looks cheap.If you've seen the brilliant first three 'Thin Man' films, don't bother with this one. You've already seen the best and you'll be disappointed here. However, if you haven't seen them yet, check this out, and then rent 'The Thin Man' movies and you'll appreciate them so much more.

LORETTA YOUNG and BRIAN AHERNE are cast as a seemingly hapless married couple who are caught up in a murder mystery that neither one is capable of dealing with. He's a mystery writer and it isn't until the story is more than half over that he begins to pick up on any sort of clues that will help solve the case.Just as baffled by the mysterious doings in a Greenwich Village apartment are policemen SIDNEY TOLER and DONALD MacBRIDE. Their bumbling efforts are mostly designed to provoke some mild laughs--which is not surprising since the story is really a light comedy with the murder aspects kept pretty much in the background so that Young and Aherne can give their comic flair a workout. The mystery angle is only sketchy and makes no real sense. There's a low-budget look to the proceedings.It's easy to take as long as you accept this in the context of a film made in the early '40s with some of the usual clichés that appear in any such comedy/mystery from that era. Some of the comedy is forced (the doors that never open properly for Aherne, candlesticks that move on their own thanks to a turtle who keeps popping up unexpectedly and even steals the bed covers off a terrified Young). All in all, it's a breezy enough effort with come amusing supporting roles and an especially good turn from LEE PATRICK and GALE SONDERGAARD.Summing up: A Columbia trifle that passes the time pleasantly and affords Loretta Young and Brian Aherne a chance to romp among wacky comedy situations.

This is available on DVD as part of Sony's "Icons of Screwball Comedy" series. I like Loretta Young, but she is certainly no "icon" of the genre, nor can this movie even be described as a "Screwball Comedy." Perhaps my disappointment in the film was based on faulty expectations. It's just a B picture from Columbia, clearly made on a shoestring budget, and what comedy there is in the film is pretty forced and obvious, exemplified by a tedious gag in which Brian Aherne has trouble opening a door. The plot -- a couple move into a building where a murderer lives -- was more entertaining when the Three Stooges did it. Even the solution to the mystery is forgettable. Young and Aherne are okay, but have nowhere near the chemistry of William Powell and Myrna Loy in their many films together. I'll give props to the cinematography: there is some fine work with limited light which, in some scenes, disguise the stage-bound nature of the film. Bottom line: this one's not worth your time.

I watch all sorts of movies. Some I watch because they transform, they are touchstones for building and affecting imagination. They help build a life, our primary enterprise.Other movies are watched because they contribute to the context: they establish the language used elsewhere. They aren't particularly transformative in themselves, but they provide a lucid understanding of the vocabulary we need for the greater work. The greater joy.Many of these "background" films for me are from the 30s. Its between the time that talkies were invented and the war changed everything, cemented by "Citizen Kane." It was a period where film didn't know what it was, where film narrative was a matter of experimentation, where amazing and strange things were attempted. I believe that you cannot be a lucid human unless you understand how you think, and that means you have to understand narrative dynamics, which means film (mostly), which means you need to wade through the 30s, with at least one focus on detective stories.If you get that far, you need to look at the afterglow as well, those films from the 40s that referenced the older experiments. While the US was at war, this is particularly strong.Here we have an afterglow film that is pretty bad watching. Its only interesting if you plug it into this lucidity project where it has a place.Like the older films, the narrative device is a writer of mystery stories puts himself and wife into a situation where he can write another. He, the writer becomes folded into the detective. A second device has to do with place: all the characters are inexplicably forced to live in the same apartment building. There's an "explanation" for this but there's no logic behind it. Its there, because the form demands it. What clues there are in the mystery come from sussing out other locations. Other reverberations: the cop here is the guy who pretends to be Chinese in the Chan series. Many of his moments are Chan moments. There's a banter borrowed from the Thin Man series. And because at this late date (three years after the death of the form it references) we can't possibly take this seriously, it is transformed into a comedy.Bad watching. Interesting for giving us fences for the paddock we play in.Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.