Christmas, unbelievably, is almost upon us, and with it an annual playlist of endlessly watched, endlessly renewable films – an entirely personal matter of curation, whether it covers It’s a Wonderful Life, The Shop Around the Corner or The Muppet Christmas Carol. (I, meanwhile, am looking forward to my first year of being able to savour the yuletide melancholy of Todd Haynes’s Carol in my own living room: bring on the jingling bells and the mournfully yearning strings.)
Over at the BFI Player, however, I recently made the acquaintance of a film that deserves as much December ubiquity as any of the above, yet remains oddly neglected in the archives. Blessed with a characteristically brut champagne script by Preston Sturges, Mitchell Leisen’s Remember the Night is special even by the bright standards of the romantic comedies that Hollywood studios pulled off so breezily in 1940. It’s the cinematic equivalent of oven-warm gingerbread. Which is not to say there’s anything overly cosy or cloying about this story of an accused shoplifter (Barbara Stanwyck) and an assistant DA (Fred MacMurray) sparring and falling inevitably in love over the course of a Christmas-time road trip from New York to Indiana.
The premise may be fancifully contrived, but the human stakes here are entirely authentic, with a moral and romantic outlook that’s exquisitely perceptive and generous. Four years before their more celebrated pairing in Double Indemnity, Stanwyck and MacMurray perfected a comfortable, crackling star chemistry, tossing Sturges’s wry, whetstone-whittled lines back and forth like a beachball, and palpably enjoying themselves in the process. And the seasonal setting is hardly incidental: this is a Christmas film powered by a loving, unsentimental spirit of goodwill to all men, and not at the expense of one scrap of wit. Seventy-six years on, it fully deserves a place in the holiday canon.
The DVD release schedule, meanwhile, has very much slowed down for Christmas, with a surfeit of less-than-festive titles waiting for Boxing Day. After all, not many will be in the mood next week for the efficiently grim criminal low jinks of Noel Clarke’s Brotherhood (Lionsgate, 15), nor the grimily dystopian violence of The Purge: Election Year (Universal, 15), though in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential victory, it’s debatable when we’ll ever be in the mood for the latter, a slickly assembled, worst-case-scenario allegory for the evils of the “alt-right”. Ditto War Dogs (Warner, 15), a brashly unpleasant, fact-based comedy in which two callow young men become embroiled in international arms dealing. Glibly written and directed by The Hangover’s Todd Phillips, it feigns moral complexity principally by making its two heroes as extravagantly unsympathetic as possible – but that doesn’t make them worthy of our time either.
Actively revelling in its protagonist’s vileness, to mostly sparky comic effect, is Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (Universal, 15), a welcome send-up of vapid fan-service pop documentaries, with Justin Bieber its principal satirical target. As walnut-brained singer-rapper Conner4Real, whose musical transition from bubblegum to wrong-headed social consciousness sends his career into freefall, the ever-game Andy Samberg and his Lonely Island troupe have created an inspired, absurd figure of fun. The film around him is less consistently on target, but when it lands, it’s delicious. I had a better time with its silliness than that of Sausage Party (Sony, 15), an adults-only animation in which a plucky frankfurter goes on a lewdly diversion-laden journey to escape his fast-food destiny. Some of the ensuing smut is clever, but its wink-wink jocularity is terminally, off-puttingly impressed with itself.
Finally, an annual tradition: assessing just how far south of his former glory the new Woody Allen film falls. Café Society (Warner, 12) lands about halfway along the scale. Shot in creamy gilded tones by the great Vittorio Storaro, this tidy fable of a young man (Jesse Eisenberg, an effective enough proxy for Allen’s own neurotic star persona) undergoing a bittersweet romantic education in 1930s Hollywood is just attractive enough to keep persistent fans hoping that its maker will completely regather his gifts at some point. As it is, his eye for relationship politics (and even his ear for dialogue) is off. Only the wonderful Kristen Stewart, wistful and weathered as the complicated object of Eisenberg’s affection, seems fully human here.
