Christmas in Connecticut (Turner Pictures, 1992)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Saturday, December 2 my husband Charles and I, on vacation to see his mother Edi for her birthday December 4, hung out at her place and she asked if there were any Christmas movies we wanted to watch. Charles suggested the 1945 film Christmas in Connecticut, which starred Barbara Stanwyck, Dennis Morgan and Sydney Greenstreet in a tale of a supposed homemaking diva (Stanwyck) who really can’t cook worth a darn and allegedly lives on a farm in Connecticut. Actually the farm is the property of an architect friend of hers (Reginald Gardiner) and the spectacular recipes in her column come from another friend, a Hungarian restaurateur (S. Z. Sakall). Elizabeth Lane (Stanwyck) has to fake it big-time when her publisher, Alexander Yardley (Greenstreet), invites a recently rescued sailor (Morgan) who was stranded on a raft for 18 days at sea with no food after his destroyer was torpedoed by Germans. Elizabeth has to borrow her friend’s farm, invite her other friend to cook his spectacular dishes, and fake being the architect’s wife and mother to his child (the baby is actually the child of a war worker who’s being sat for by Gardiner’s servant, the inimitable Una O’Connor; she’s actually looking after two babies, a girl and a boy, and of course the other characters wonder about the gender switches). Of course it all ends happily with the columnist and the sailor paired off after some quite engaging and hilarious complications. I’d shown Charles this movie years ago and it had become enough of a favorite of his that he wanted to see it again – and given that Edi’s Amazon Prime page listed not only the 1945 Christmas in Connecticut but its 1992 made-for-TV remake, I suggested we watch both of them consecutively.

The 1992 version was directed by (but did not star) Arnold Schwarzenegger, with Dyan Cannon (the fourth of Cary Grant’s five wives and the only one who had his child, daughter Jennifer) in the Stanwyck role, Kris Kristofferson in Morgan’s, and Tony Curtis’s as a combination of Greenstreet’s and Gardiner’s. It was written by Janet Brownell, based on the 1945 screenplay by Aileen Hamilton (story) and Lionel Houser and former Deanna Durbin writer Adele Commandini (script). There were a number of intriguing changes to the story; for some reason Elizabeth’s last name acquired a “B” at the beginning so she became Blane, not Lane; Jefferson Jones (Kris Kristofferson, playing Dennis Morgan’s character from the original), became a forest ranger in Colorado whose house burned down while he was trapped for six days rescuing a boy (whom we never see) from an avalanche; and the big luxury item Elizabeth treats herself to was changed from a full-length mink coat to an antique statuette because furs in general and minks in particular have become so politically incorrect these days. (In the 1945 version S. Z. Sakall gets a line, “Nobody needs a mink coat except the minks,” which comes closer to a modern sensibility on the subject than anything else in the original film.) Brownell was quite clever at figuring out ways to integrate well-known scenes from the 1945 version into this one, including a big town dance and the scene in which the romantic leads sit in a carriage and end up taking it for a joy ride through the Connecticut back roads and ultimately get arrested for stealing it.

She also added some new wrinkles; this Elizabeth Blane is portraying not only a mother but a grandmother. Her “daughter” is actually Yardley’s sister Josie (Kelly Cinante), and her alleged son-in-law is Tyler (Gene Lythgow), an aspiring actor who has an audition coming up to play a serial killer on a soap opera and is running around the house muttering serial-killer dialogue that spooks Yardley into believing he really is a serial killer. The two kids are Anthony, a.k.a. Kevin (Jimmy Workman) and baby Melissa (unidentified on imdb.com). Her cook, Norah (Vivian Bonnell), combining the S. Z. Sakall and Una O’Connor characters from the original, is also her personal assistant, and Charles joked that the servant character was changed from one ethnic stereotype (Irish) to another (Black). The big climax is a live telecast of the fabulous Christmas meal from Elizabeth’s supposed farm, only it turns into the predictable shambles as the kids break Yardley’s prized antiques and Elizabeth finally realizes she can’t sustain her deception anymore and admits to the live TV audience that she really can’t cook and is faking it all. The executive at the TV network, Prescott (Richard Roundtree – it’s a nice indication of racial progress that this role could be portrayed by a Black man, and Roundtree was still relatively good-looking instead of his later “Black Sydney Greenstreet” dimensions), pulls the plug on the show but later relents and offers to keep Elizabeth on at double her previous salary. Brownell changed the ending, ironically, to make it even closer to old-movie cliches than the 1945 original. In the 1945 version, Stanwyck’s Elizabeth accepted the raise and continued as the era’s Martha Stewart (the modern-day parallel that usually gets mentioned when this movie is discussed); in 1992, Dyan Cannon’s version goes off to live with Kris Kristofferson in the wilds of Colorado, forsaking big-city success to live in the country with her man. This takes the story into the 1930’s movie convention of “country good, city bad,” and also left me wondering – like the endings of such different novels as Ramona and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, just how a relatively pampered, spoiled young (or youngish) woman is going to be able to handle “life in the wild” with a man, however sexy he might be!