Christmas In Connecticut

This week I continue my annual holiday mission to provide alternative Christmas movies. Of course, I love It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, and Elf as much as anybody else, but I also think there should be other options, good options. There’s no end of Hallmark and Lifetime movies on TV with generic titles like A Christmas Wish and The Santa Plan, but I’m talking about real movies, things that are worth seeing and not anything that stars Jenny Mcarthy or former cast members of Beverly Hills 90210.

This year my suggestion is 1945’s Christmas in Connecticut. Directed by Peter Godfrey, the film stars one of my all-time favorites, Barbara Stanwyck, along with Dennis Morgan, a popular leading man of the day, and Sydney Greenstreet, the famous “fat man” from both The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca.

 

Stanwyck plays Elizabeth Lane, a young, single, city woman who writes a kind of Martha Stewart-esque feature in a Good Housekeeping type magazine. While sitting comfortably in her city apartment eating take out, she writes about her farm in Connecticut, her charming husband, and beautiful baby, and about cooking delicious, elaborate food. Of course, as I said, Elizabeth is single, lives in the city, and can’t cook her way out of wet paper sack. She consults a chef friend for details on cooking and basically makes the rest up. This becomes a problem when a returning war hero, a sailor who was stranded on a raft in the South Pacific for fifteen days, tells someone his only request is to have a Christmas dinner made by the famous Elizabeth Lane on her farm in Connecticut.

Elizabeth’s blustering publisher played by Sydney Greenstreet has no idea that her columns are totally fabricated, so he thinks her hosting the sailor is a great idea and an excellent publicity opportunity. He’s also obsessed with the truth and would fire her if he knew she was making stuff up.

So Elizabeth has to get a farm, a husband, a baby, and cooking skills in time to host this random sailor or be outed as a fraud and lose her job. She has a would-be boyfriend played by Reginald Gardiner who has proposed to her repeatedly, and as a matter of expediency, she decides she should finally accept his proposal because, if nothing else, he happens to have a large, beautiful farm in, you guessed it, snowy Connecticut.

The film beings to pick up speed once Elizabeth, her fiancée who insists they get married right away, the judge who is supposed to marry them, the chef Elizabeth brought to help with the cooking, her publisher who invited himself along, and the handsome and charming sailor are all under the same roof. The pace isn’t quite fast enough to qualify Christmas in Connecticut as a screwball comedy, but it’s definitely in that neighborhood.

 

As ever, Stanwyck is delightful. This is the first film she made after playing a cold, platinum blonde killer in Double Indemnity in 1944, and those two films side by side show her tremendous range. Here, she’s charming, smart, and flirty and she makes a great comedic and romantic lead. 

The Connecticut farm set is big, elaborate, and lovely. It’s a fantastic example of classic Hollywood set design and every bit of the snow covered farmhouse, the barn, and the snowy fields was built and shot indoors in sunny California. Like the great performances and the sort of silly, old fashioned plot, it’s an example of the Hollywood dream factory operating at its best.

So if you’re in the mood for some vintage Christmas cheer but have seen Jimmy Stewart running down the streets of Bedford Falls a few too many times, give Christmas in Connecticut a try.

This review originally appeared on Q90.1. www.deltabroadcasting.org