Remember the Night (1940), directed by Mitch Leisen and written by Preston Sturges

Remember the Night is a prosecutor (Fred MacMurray) in love with a shoplifter (Barbara Stanwyck); it is close to a great film, and arguably the most human love story Preston Sturges ever wrote.
---David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Knopf, 2014).

Remember the Night is the last film Preston Sturges wrote before he began directing his own screenplays and, though I am a great admirer of the films Sturges directed, Leisen brought a level of emotion to Sturges's screenplays (he also directed Sturges's script for Easy Living, 1938) that was sometimes lacking in Sturges's own films.  I think that Remember the Night is still not the popular Christmas movie that Frank Capra's banal populist It's a Wonderful Life (1948) is, less because of the presence of African-American actor Snowflake (as some have suggested; he is also in several of the films Sturges directed and plays a canny employee) than the subtlety of Remember the Night which, unlike Capra's film, doesn't cover up the darkness with angels and a forced happy ending.  One of the themes of Remember the Night is that one has to be accountable, not to God or authorities but to oneself.  My seven-year-old daughter Victoria watched the film with Susan, Gideon and me and seemed to enjoy it until the end, when Barbara Stanwyck accepted that she would have to go to jail and MacMurray said he would wait for her.  Victoria doesn't like it when characters she likes have to go to jail; she loves Chaplin's short films but hates when Chaplin is arrested or ends up alone, as in Modern Times(1936) or The Circus (1928) -- I am now saving City Lights (1931) for when she is older.

Although Leisen's films can be quite funny (see my post of May 19, 2016, about Suddenly It's Spring, 1947, also starring Fred MacMurray) Remember the Night is also quite serious, as the best comedies always are.  Though MacMurray's rural family is quite charming Sturges and Leisen also show the darker side of small-town Indiana:  a farmer does a citizen's arrest of MacMurray and Stanwyck when they accidentally end up in his cow pasture and use a cow's milk for breakfast; then when Stanwyck goes to see her mother for the first time since she ran away as a teenager her mother throws her out of the house as a "no-good thief."  So they spend Christmas with MacMurray's mother, maiden aunt and hired boy.  One of my favorite scenes in the movie is when Aunt Emma takes out her wedding dress for Stanwyck to wear to the barn dance; Emma was briefly engaged and with the dress is a bundle of letters, which Emma holds up briefly and then quietly puts away.