A Night to Remember **** (1942, Loretta Young, Brian Aherne) – Classic Movie Review 12,158

Loretta Young stars in A Night to Remember (1942).

The 1942 comic murder mystery film A Night to Remember is full of zest, zip and zing. Loretta Young and Brian Aherne star as a New York thriller-writing couple who discover a body at their Greenwich Village apartment on 13 Gay Street.

‘THE MOST MIRTHFUL MURDER MYSTERY IN YEARS!’

Director Richard Wallace’s zestful 1942 A Night to Remember is a bright, comic murder mystery that sees New York thriller-writing couple Loretta Young and Brian Aherne discover a body at their Greenwich Village apartment and set about finding the murderer.

The young married couple Nancy (Loretta Young) and Jeff Troy (Brian Aherne) move into a gloomy basement apartment on 13 Gay Street, Greenwich Village, to soak up the atmosphere so that he can write a mystery novel. But the residents are all acting very strangely, and then a corpse turns up, a man found dead in the backyard, after having been drowned in the apartment’s bathtub.

There is plenty of witty banter in the smart dialogue, the comedy is full of zip, the mystery is intricate enough to keep whodunit fans guessing, and the entire movie bursts with invention and zing courtesy of the smart pacing.

A Night to Remember is definitely a film to remember. Young and Aherne are a good team, and the character actors turn up the heat. Sidney Toler and Blanche Yurka are hit turns as the police inspector and daffy charlady.

The screenplay by Richard Flournoy and Jack Henley is based on the novel The Frightened Stiff by Kelley Roos.

The cast are Loretta Young as Nancy Troy, Brian Aherne as Jeff Troy, Jeff Donnell as Anne Carstairs, William Wright as Scott Carstairs, Sidney Toler as Inspector Hankins, Gale Sondergaard as Mrs Devoe, Donald MacBride as Bolling, Lee Patrick as Polly Franklin, Don Costello as Eddie Turner, Blanche Yurka as Mrs Salter, Richard Gaines as Lingle, James Burke as Pat Murphy.

A Night to Remember is directed by Richard Wallace, runs 91 minutes, is made and released by Columbia Pictures, is written by Richard Flournoy and Jack Henley, based on the novel The Frightened Stiff by Kelley Roos, is shot in black and white by Joseph Walker, is produced by Samuel Bischoff, and scored by Morris Stoloff and Werner Heymann.

Obviously the later British Titantic film A Night to Remember is unrelated.

The 1942 movie A Night to Remember portrays 13 Gay Street.

The 1942 movie A Night to Remember starring Loretta Young portrays 13 Gay Street as the address of the building where most of the action, including a murder, occurs. 

Gay Street is a short, angled street in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. The street’s name does not refer to the LGBTQ+ character of Greenwich Village, but probably derives from a family named Gay who owned land or lived there in colonial times.

in September 1983, the opening shots of Cyndi Lauper’s video for ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’ were filmed on Gay Street. Sheryl Crow made a video on Gay Street for the song ‘A Change Would Do You Good’ in 1996.

© Derek Winnert 2022 Classic Movie Review 12,158

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com