Day 62: "Remember Last Night"

Director: James Whale 1935
This movie is so obscure that the IMDB doesn't have an image for it--and there's a good reason for its obscurity: it's unbelievably awful. I seem to be trapped in some kind of 1930s black hole of stinko pictures (see the two immediate entries below). I TiVo'ed this on TCM (best network on TV) because Whale was the director, and he did great things with "Frankenstein" and "Bride of Frankenstein." But whatever magic he had is sadly absent in this comic-murder mystery. It's as if someone at Universal took a look at the deserved popularity of the Thin Man pictures and decided to make a movie in that dry-martini vein. What you get are Robert Young and Constance Cummings as drunken, dithering Long Island aristos who are caught up in a couple of murders. The dialogue is so arch, the delivery so bone-headed that you realize what gifted actors Myrna Loy and William Powell were. There also is one of the most racist scenes I've ever seen in a film outside of "Birth of a Nation." Even for an movie freak like me (meaning I'll give almost anything any old film a try), this was painful.