Remember Last Night?

Delightful screwball parody of the detective thriller, where the discovery of a corpse among inert revellers after a wild party triggers a sparkling cascade of gags eventually taking off into surrealist fantasy. Cheerfully annexing ice-cubes from the packs on their hungover heads to mix a hair of the dog, faltering only momentarily as they discover another body sleeping it off ('Steady! They can't all be dead'), the hero and heroine (beautifully played by Young and Cummings) are clearly derived from the Nick and Nora Charles of The Thin Man. But Whale's use of elisions, non-sequiturs and unexpected stresses creates what is virtually a blueprint for the style developed by Robert Altman in and after MASH.