Christmas in Connecticut (Warner Bros., 1944, released 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I watched a movie he had specifically asked to see, and rather than search for any home-recorded copy I might have had I went ahead and ordered it from Amazon.com, which because I’m an Amazon Prime member shipped it to me in a day or two: Christmas in Connecticut, a film made by Warner Bros. in 1944 (the original copyright date) but not released until August 11, 1945 (not only a bit early in the year for a Christmas movie but also odd in that the film’s plot assumes that World War II is still a going concern -- one big scene occurs at a dance that is being held as part of a War Bond drive -- when in fact it was just about over by the time the film came out). Charles and I had seen it before and remembered it fondly (and I have a previous moviemagg blog post on it at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/12/christmas-in-connecticut-warner-bros.html) -- and still enjoyed it. I don’t know whether he’s seen the remake that was done for TV in the 1990’s with Dyan Cannon (fourth of the five Mrs. Cary Grants) in the lead, played here by the incomparable Barbara Stanwyck, and Arnold Schwarzenegger directing for what I think is the first and only time in his career. I certainly haven’t, and I can’t imagine it better than this one.

Christmas in Connecticut was directed by Peter Godfrey -- an O.K. filmmaker whom Jack Warner for some reason decided to give a major “push” to while simultaneously driving away better but also more troublesome directors like John Huston and Howard Hawks -- from a script by Lionel Houser and Adele Commandini based on a story by Aileen Hamilton. The story opens in the North Atlantic, where a German U-Boat sinks a U.S. Navy ship and we see only two survivors, Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan) and his pal Sinkiewicz (Frank Jenks). Jones is having a hallucination on board their lifeboat in which he’s eating a seven-course gourmet meal and Sinkiewicz is the tuxedo-clad waiter serving him. They’re finally rescued, but this movie’s obsession with food continues as Sinkiewicz is allowed to eat anything he wants in the hospital but Jones is fed only milk and eggs (one breakfast is a raw egg cracked and poured into a bowl of milk, which looks as ghastly as it sounds). Jones wonders what he has to do to get a decent meal and his buddy tells him to “use the old magoo” -- i.e., to cruise the nurse that serves him, Mary Lee (Joyce Compton, speaking with so thick a Southern accent you think, “What else could be called but ‘Mary Lee’?”). It works, but Mary is so taken with him she expects him to marry her, and in order to get Jones a real Christmas with a real home-cooked meal she writes a letter to magazine publisher Alexander Yardley (Sidney Greenstreet, marvelously imperious but also showing off the comedy chops that had made him a stage star -- his most famous live role was Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff -- before his film debut at age 61 as Casper Gutman in The Maltese Falcon gave him a movie career but also “typed” him as a super-villain), whom she knows because she once nursed his great-granddaughter in a hospital and brought her back to health.

The letter asks if Jones can be invited to the home of Elizabeth Lane (Barbara Stanwyck) to share Christmas with her, her husband, their baby and the animals on their farm in Connecticut. Elizabeth Lane is the star writer for Yardley’s Smart Housekeeping magazine and she poses as an authority on home life in general and home cooking in particular -- every one of her articles features mouth-watering descriptions of gourmet dishes and recipes so you can make them at home. Just about everyone who talks or writes about this movie now makes the obvious comparison to Martha Stewart, but this would-be kitchen diva can’t cook at all and she lives alone in a tiny New York apartment with a view of the building next door and the clothesline on its roof. She gets the fabulous recipes she puts in her columns from her friend, Hungarian expatriate restaurateur Felix Bassenak (S. Z. “Cuddles” Sakall in one of his most extensive and delightful performances) and pretty much fakes all the rest. Needless to say, she’s scared to death about having to impersonate a married Connecticut farm resident who’s also a kitchen whiz -- and though this hadn’t occurred to me before Stanwyck’s role in Christmas in Connecticut is a parody of her role in Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe: the committed woman journalist who’s invented a hoax to keep her job with an imperious publisher and has to go to extremes to make sure she isn’t found out and fired.

In this case the lengths she goes to include accepting the frequent marriage proposals of her friend John Sloan (Reginald Gardiner, whose acting here is more “straight” than in some of his films that weren’t meant to be comedies -- like the 1954 Black Widow, a favorite of mine and essentially a murder mystery grafted onto the plot of All About Eve), an architect and a foofy bore who drones on and on about his ideas for heating and plumbing the buildings he designs. She suggests they get married by a local justice of the peace in the Connecticut village near Sloan’s farm, and Sloan’s housekeeper Norah (Una O’Connor, considerably more restrained than she was in James Whale’s The Invisible Man and The Bride of Frankenstein) supplies the baby -- actually two babies she’s baby-sitting for women involved in defense production. Only the two babies not only look visibly different (one has a shock of blond hair and talks) but are of opposite genders. Elizabeth also invites Felix, ostensibly as a friend but actually because she needs him to cook the spectacular dishes Yardley and Jones are both expecting from The Great Household Diva.

What follows is the sort of movie in which much of the enjoyment comes from watching the writers write themselves into one corner after another and then wait for the ingenious ways they think of to write themselves out of it again. Christmas in Connecticut is a series of tests for its female lead to see if she can maintain the pose of a married woman and a household expert -- particularly tough given whom she has to pretend to be married to -- including a set of preposterous scenes in which Elizabeth is challenged to flip pancakes (or, as they’re called in the script, “flapjacks”) in a skillet without using a spatula (that would be cheating) or having the half-cooked pancake land on the ceiling, the floor, the rest of the stove, or her face. Of course the Hollywood-inevitable happens and Elizabeth finds herself falling hard for Jefferson Jones, who’s tall, hunky, a war hero and has a great Irish tenor voice (this was four years before Dennis Morgan starred as Irish-American musical star Chauncey Olcott in the biomusical My Wild Irish Rose, and here gets to croon a new song called “The Wish That I Wish Tonight” as well as the familiar carol “O Little Town of Bethlehem”), though it takes a runaway cow who buries them in snow and (later) a runaway horse that takes them for a sleigh ride as they’re sitting in the sleigh outside that barn dance to bring them together.

Christmas in Connecticut is a marvelously insouciant film -- it’s essentially a screwball comedy made about a decade after the heyday of that genre, but it’s still damned funny and a much more interesting bit of pre-holiday fare than yet another slog through A Christmas Carol. Last time both Charles and I were particularly impressed by Barbara Stanwyck’s performance, but this time around we saw it as much more of an ensemble cast -- not only showcasing Stanwyck’s incredible versatility (she manages the transitions from self-assured domestic diva to scared little hoaxter to almost girlish lovestruck fool seamlessly -- I’ve long hailed Stanwyck as the movies’ greatest actress for her sheer versatility, matched by no one in her own time and only by Meryl Streep since) and Greenstreet’s rarely preserved talent for comedy, but the rest of the cast also scintillates and even Dennis Morgan, in a character that usually would just be the romantic stick-figure lead the Hollywood formulae obliged the heroine to end up with because they had to pair her up with someone at the end, turns in a nice comic performance and gives the character at least some dimension. The last time I watched this I lamented that the director was Peter Godfrey instead of Preston Sturges or Howard Hawks (who’d made Stanwyck’s two best comedies, The Lady Eve and Ball of Fire, respectively), but while he’s not in their league as a farceur Godfrey turns in an admirable job here and puts a well-trained cast through their paces as he moves the plot efficiently through the sheer looniness of the writing committee’s inventions. It’s a sheer delight start-to-finish and arguably the prototype of all the Christmas movies on the Hallmark Channel and Lifetime -- the sort of story where you know how things are going to end up but it’s still a lot of fun watching them get there.