The Night of January 16th is a 1941 American crime drama film directed by William Clemens, based on a 1934 play of the same name by Ayn Rand.

Steve Van Ruyle (Robert Preston) is a sailor who inherits a position on the board of a company headed by Bjorn Faulkner (Nils Asther).

The movie rights to the play were initially purchased by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in October 1934 as a possible vehicle for Loretta Young.

[1] After MGM's option expired, Al Woods, who was producing the play on Broadway, considered making a movie version through a production company of his own.

[3] The play took place entirely in a courtroom, and its best-known feature was that it used a jury selected from members of the audience, who would decide the defendant's guilt or innocence at the end.

This feature was impossible to reproduce in a movie, so the new screenplay altered the plot significantly, focusing on Steve Van Ruyle, a character that did not exist in the play.

[5][6][11] Rand claimed only a single line from her original dialog appeared in the movie, which she dismissed as a "cheap, trashy vulgarity".