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.

"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.

I saw this 1935 movie as a Greek twelve-year old in Alexandria, Egypt where I grew up, and I have never forgotten it -- because of the cast which contains many of my favorite actors and mainly Arthur Treacher (who is unjustly trashed by another of your reviewers). Ever since it became possible to own and view movies on VHS and DVD I have been trying to get a copy of this one but to no avail. I even sent IMDb an email asking if you could help me find it but got no reply. Then, lo and behold, I found it the other day on a web site entitled LovingtheClassics.com, on sale for $14.99. I ordered it immediately and have just enjoyed seeing it again after all these years. I am sending you this in case there are any other old codgers like me around and who might remember and want to see it again.Best regards, Alec Kitroeff

Report from Cinesation 2006: REMEMBER LAST NIGHT? (****) The notes suggested that James Whale sold this idea to Universal by comparing it to The Thin Man-- but it's The Thin Man as written by Evelyn Waugh, a tale of bright young things drinking and partying fast enough to keep despair at bay, and a reminder that Whale belonged to the same generation of artists formed by World War I who produced things like The Sun Also Rises and Goodbye To All That. A group of young friends party the night away on a series of amazing Art Deco sets, and when they wake up in the morning, one of them has been murdered. As the mystery-plot mechanics take over, it loses some of its brittle, dark charm, relying on Arthur Treacher in the Thesiger part as a mordant butler for laughs. But at its best this is one of the most striking comedies of the 30s, energetic and gay (in the old sense-- mostly) and often very funny, yet worldly and almost bleak at the same time. If only the solution of the mystery could have paid off the film's tone thematically. The collector's print shown, incidentally, was 16mm, but could have been 35mm for how beautifully it showed off the film's remarkable sets.