Entering the final week of this foolhardy yuletide movie mission, I’m pleased that Christmas in Connecticut turns out to be a fine, old-fashioned festive farce. This 1945 film is enjoyably silly with its tongue planted firmly in cheek, as Barbara Stanwyck shines in the role of a very successful magazine columnist whose web of lies that threatens to come untangled all around her, creating her most chaotic Christmas ever. Stanwyck is Elizabeth Lane, whose good housekeeping column has become a national sensation in WWII America. Only problem is, it’s a total sham.
In her articles she’s a happily married mother who lives on a quaint Connecticut farm, rustlin’ up good old-fashioned home cookin’ but in real life, she’s a single big city girl, passing off the recipes of her successful chef friend Felix (S.Z. Sakall) as her own. It’s all going remarkably well until the thoroughly unlikely intervention of war hero Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan) who, on his sick bed, became enamoured with Lane’s writing and idyllic representations of country life. Lane’s publisher arranges a promotional stunt whereby the war hero will visit Elizabeth and family on the farm and hang out for Christmas.
Elizabeth, Felix and her long-standing lounge-lizard friend/admirer John (Reginald Gardiner) quickly scheme to come up with a country home, farm and a baby pretty ASAP to create the perfect facade and save her job and Christmas. It’s frantic and farcical but the film whooshes along at a fair old pace and game performances from all involved force you to submit to its will. This is screwball daftness done well with the holiday setting putting a fine festive sheen on everything.
Mischievous English scallywag John poses as Elizabeth’s husband, though he also really wants to persuade her to marry him anyway, so when handsome, endearing Jefferson shows up at the door, generating some serious romantic heat with the conniving columnist, it leads to all sorts of mad complications. Jefferson’s not the sort of bloke to hit on a married woman but their attraction is so obvious, Elizabeth has to wrestle with the whole ‘career versus romance’ conundrum to decide what matters to her the most.
There’s some amusing stuff with the ‘borrowed’ baby being temporarily replaced with another child that looks completely different, then causing total panic by then disappearing altogether.
Stanwyck is a giggle as the city dame pretending she has a clue how to run a farm when the mere sight of a cow at the window is enough to make her shit herself. Also, you’ve got to love a movie where there’s some serious high stakes tension over a woman’s ability to flip a pancake.
It’s all very lively and fun and Morgan is dreamy as the war veteran who’s been pulling off a bit of a scam himself. You can get an idea of the lightweight, merry nature of things when you realise that all of this comes about because Jefferson wanted slightly better hospital food.
This one's as light and breezy as they come, the perfect, convivial film for a frosty Sunday afternoon.
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