Christmas in Connecticut

Plot synopsis:
Elizabeth Lane (Barbara Stanwyck) is a single food writer living in New York whose articles about her fictitious Connecticut farm, husband and baby are admired by housewives across the country. Her publisher, Alexander Yardley (Sydney Greenstreet), is unaware of the charade and insists that Elizabeth host a Christmas dinner for returning war hero Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan), who read all of her recipes while in the hospital, and is so fond of her that his nurse wrote a letter to the publisher. Facing a career-ending scandal, not only for herself, but also for her editor, Dudley Beecham (Robert Shayne), Lane is forced to comply. In desperation, Elizabeth agrees to marry her friend John Sloan (Reginald Gardiner), who has a farm in Connecticut, even though she does not love him. She also enlists the help of another friend, chef Felix Bassenak (S.Z. Sakall), who has been providing her with the recipes for her articles.
At Sloan's picturesque Connecticut farm on Christmas Eve, Elizabeth meets Nora (Una O'Connor), the housemaid, as well as a neighbor's baby whom they pretend is their baby. Elizabeth and John plan to be married immediately by Judge Crothers (Dick Elliott), but the ceremony is interrupted when Jefferson arrives and it is love at first sight. Jefferson, in contrast to Elizabeth, is trained through the children of his sister to cope with babies, so they—it's more him—give the baby a bath; after dinner they spend time together in the barn. They are falling in love, but Jefferson restrains himself because he believes that Elizabeth is married with a child.
The judge returns on Christmas morning, but the ceremony is postponed a second time when a different neighbor's baby is presented instead of the one from the day before. The household is alarmed when Felix claims that the baby has swallowed his watch. After the judge leaves, Felix admits to Elizabeth that he had lied about the watch to stop the wedding. While the household attends a local dance, the baby's real mother arrives to pick up her baby. Yardley witnesses her leaving with the child, and assumes someone is kidnapping the baby. He calls the police and the newspapers. Elizabeth and Jefferson spend the night in jail, mistakenly charged with stealing a neighbor's horse and sleigh, and return to the farm early the next morning. Yardley chastises Elizabeth for being out all night and accuses her of neglecting her child. Elizabeth finally confesses all. Furious, Mr. Yardley fires her.
Jefferson's fiancée, Mary Lee, arrives unexpectedly. Dejected, Elizabeth retires to pack her things and leave the farm. Felix learns that Mary Lee has already married someone else and must break the engagement. He entices Yardley into the kitchen with the smell of cooking kidneys. He fabricates a story about a competing magazine's attempts to hire Elizabeth, and Yardley decides to hire her back at double her salary. Felix tells Jefferson that he is free to pursue Elizabeth. Elizabeth's packing is interrupted, first by Yardley and then by Jefferson. After teasing her that he is a cad who woos married women, Jefferson reveals the truth. The couple kiss and plan to marry.

Tags: romantic

Review:
Anyone who has watched the recent remake of 'Christmas in Connecticut' will fully appreciate just how wonderful the slim story was in the hands of Barbara Stanwyck, Dennis Morgan and Sydney Greenstreet.
The whole film revolves around the mistaken belief by editor Greenstreet that Stanwyck (his favorite Martha Stewart-type of writer) is a homemaker with a house, husband and baby in the country.
This, of course, means that the inventive woman has to enlist the aid of others to play out her scheme when Greenstreet invites himself and a ship-wrecked sailor (Dennis Morgan) for the holiday week-end.The slight comedy develops a few complications along the way--and it all looks very holidayish with the lovely country home in Connecticut--which, thanks to Warner Bros.
She gets great support from Una O'Connor, S.Z. Sakall and Reginald Gardiner under Peter Godfrey's light-hearted direction.It's as unpretentious a confection as a child's homemade Christmas card and just as charming--light and fluffy entertainment that makes no great demands on your viewing pleasure.
The supporting cast helps out, with the likes of "Cuddles" Sakall and Sydney Greenstreet getting some good moments.This kind of light but worthwhile feature is not as easy as it looks - as witness the string of crass, barely watchable holiday features of recent years.
From the perspective of the hectic, contemporary world in which we live, the so called `good old days' always seem so much more serene and innocent; an idyllic era gone by of which we have only memories and shadows that linger on the silver screen, as with `Christmas In Connecticut,' a warm and endearing film directed by Peter Godfrey.
Barbara Stanwyck stars as Elizabeth Lane, a popular `Martha Stewart' type magazine columnist who writes about life on her beloved farm in Connecticut, always with the latest recipe at the center of the story.
Yardley has never visited her farm, and in response to an idea expressed to him in a letter from a nurse, Mary (Joyce Compton), he decides to spend an old fashioned Christmas with Elizabeth, her husband and child and, as a special guest, a certain Mr. Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan), a sailor just recovered from spending fifteen days at sea on a raft after his ship was torpedoed.
What follows is a charming and delightfully romantic comedy that transports the audience back to a seemingly more simple time and place, to share a Christmas Past where a warm hearth, good food and kindness prevail.Barbara Stanwyck absolutely sparkles as Elizabeth, with a smile and presence warmer than anything the grandest hearth could provide, and totally convincing as a city girl entirely out of her element on the farm.
It's a straightforward, honest portrayal, and it's a joy to watch him work; the most memorable scenes in the movie belong to him.The supporting cast includes Reginald Gardiner (John Sloan), the terrific Una O'Connor (Norah), Frank Jenks (Sinkewicz) and Dick Elliott (Judge Crothers).
A feel-good movie that plays especially well during the Christmas Season (though it would work any time of the year), `Christmas In Connecticut' is a memorable film that never takes itself too seriously, is thoroughly uplifting and will leave you with a warm spot in your heart and a sense of peace that makes the world seem like a good place to be.
After all, color was not widely used in the 40s, and most of the classic movies have to be seen in its original format because, what would be accomplished in 'coloring' them?This film should be a requirement for anyone looking to spend almost two hours of uninterrupted fun at Christmas time because total merriment is assured.
If it weren't for the fact that the other was done 20 years later, I'd say it was a remake.Just as Rock Hudson was a phony fishing expert for Abercrombie&Fitch who had to get some on the job training at a fishing tournament, Barbara Stanwyck plays an forties version of Martha Stewart.Stanwyck's a cooking columnist who's built up this whole image of living on a small Connecticut farm with husband and baby cooking all these marvelous delicacies.
But her writing is a hit with the public.Trouble comes when she's hijacked into cooking a home Christmas dinner for a war hero sailor played by Dennis Morgan who gets to sing a couple of songs as well.
Reginald Gardiner and Stanwyck have no chemistry at all, obvious to all but Reggie and he's funny in his stuffed shirt way.Most people remember this film as one of Sidney Greenstreet's few ventures into comedy.
Stanwyck and Morgan are perfect together, and Greenstreet is the antithesis of his usual character, Sakall is a blustering joy to watch.It is light relief and certainly does not tax the brain, but leaves you feeling glad that you saw it.I can't wait for it to become available on DVD in the UK.
At the time that this movie was made most housewives knew exactly who Barbara Stanwick was parodying.Today only some women over 50 probably remember Gladys Taber,whose column "Butternut Wisdom" ran in Family Circle Magazine from before World War II until the 1970's.She lived on Stillmeadow Farm in Conecticut,and her columns were collected into a number of books,Stillmeadow Seasons, Stillmeadow Daybook, etc.
The lines that Barbara Stanwick recites as she types them for her column are quite typical of the ones that began a typical Gladys Taber column.Besides cooking and country living,she got rather nostalgic and philosophical at times.She talked a lot about her favorite dogs, mostly cocker spaniels.You might say that Martha Stewart is the Gladys Tabor of today.Christmas is Connecticut may not be any cinematic masterpiece,but it is pleasant,lighthearted entertainment,soothing to the stressed out mind,and that is good enough.
Christmas in Connecticut (1945 - Directed by Peter Godfrey) Barbara Stanwyck stars as a well-known magazine food writer who has been lying to her millions of fans that she is married with child and lives the traditional wife/mother role in a lovely country farm house.
Magazine editor Sydney Greenstreet decides that Stanwyck should host returning war veteran Dennis Morgan at her country house over the Christmas holidays!
He seduces his nurse expecting to get solid food and she decides to write to Alexander Yardley (Sydney Greenstreet), who is the owner of the Smart Housekeeping magazine where the famous journalist Elizabeth Lane (Barbara Stanwyck) writes a column about recipes and food, asking him to allow Jefferson to spend Christmas with Elizabeth and her family in her farm in Connecticut.
The things get complicated when Yardley also decides to spend Christmas with Elizabeth while she falls in love with Jones."Christmas in Connecticut" is a delightful and witty comedy of errors about a famous food writer that makes up a fictitious life and has guests to her world.
The other cast members effectively complete the story, and include Dennis Morgan (Jefferson Jones), Reginald Gardiner (John Sloan), and Sydney Greenstreet (Alexander Yardley).Elizabeth Lane is a journalist who writes food articles, portraying herself as a happily married country homemaker with children.
Elizabeth gets away with her deception until the publisher of her magazine, Alexander Yardley, decides he wants a nice old fashioned country Christmas, and invites himself to visit her, bringing with him a returning war hero, Jefferson Jones, a sailor who had been shipwrecked.
There is nothing religious or Santa Claus related about it, although there is a prominent Christmas tree in the living room, and Elizabeth Lane (Barbara Stanwyck) has trouble decorating it; also, the war hero, Jeff (Dennis Morgan), sings a Christmas song at one point.
While the final result is not surprising, the way it's carried out is.Besides Stanwyck playing off Morgan, there's an interesting relationship between Uncle Felix (S.Z. Sakall) and Alexander Yardley (Sydney Greenstreet), two outstanding actors who also played in Casablanca.
Sakall is an excellent character actor who is not that well known, but I hope to find him in more movies.Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide only gives this movie 2.5 stars, but I think it is worth at least 3.5, if not 4, stars as one of the most hilarious 40's comedies and an excellent Christmas season film..
Uncle Felix (S.Z. Sakall) sizes up each person for us while trying to protect "Lishka" (Barbara Stanwyck), and this helps us decide who we are going to root for in the end.If we could ever achieve a perfect world, imperfect people would likely have to undergo a series of events such as these.A glaring weakness is that fake baby cry after it allegedly swallowed Uncle Felix's watch.
The publisher Alexander Yardley (Sydney Greenstreet) insists that Elizabeth host a Christmas dinner for returning war hero Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan).
Chaos ensues, and the charade becomes increasingly difficult to play out, especially when Stanwyck falls in love with Morgan.This is such a wonderful movie, and even if you're gravely depressed, "Christmas in Connecticut" can lift you right out of it.
S.Z. Sakall as the fake uncle/real chef is hilarious, especially as he prays Stanwyck can flip a pancake before an audience.I can imagine the impact this delightful film had at the tail end of World War II.
Full of preposterous turns of events, poor acting likely due to direction since it involves such otherwise great actors, boring scenes, an overly long story line that never seems to end and the miscasting of Barbara Stanwyck as a romantic lead (sorry, I don't see her in that role and in fact this movie shoots her face in ways that makes her look the least attractive I've ever seen her in a movie), this movie disappoints.
Elizabeth Lane (Barbara Stanwyck) is a magazine columnist, who offers cooking and homemaking tips from the perspective of her life as a wife and mother on a Connecticut farm.
Your mouth will water at the sight of some of the delectable meals that are placed before your famished eyes.But, with that said, I found this somewhat screwy Chick Flick wasn't exactly the sort of cold-climate story that's guaranteed to warm your heart, nor put you into the Christmas spirit, or anything like that, at all.But, still, this film does have its entertaining moments, even though its plot was just a wafer-thin "Girl-Gets-Boy-To-The-Altar" story with a predictable, token "happy ending" conveniently tacked on for good measure.This piece of airy fluff has Barbara Stanwyck playing character Elizabeth Lane, a chic, NYC writer for Smart Housekeeping magazine, who's got her naive readers believing her to be the most ideally perfect homemaker on the face of the planet (but, in reality, she's far from being that).This standard studio corn has Miss Lane cornered into entertaining both a dashing, young war veteran and her overbearing boss in a cozy, but posh, Connecticut home for the holidays.Filmed in b&w, this offering from Warner Bros.
The "screwball comedies" were full of that stuff and so were a lot of the Fred Astaire films.Here, Barbara Stanwyck plays a famous "country" magazine writer who has been lying to the public for years, and feels she has to keep lying to keep her persona (and her job).
When she's put in the position of having to make a big Christmas dinner for her publisher (the always excellent Sydney Greenstreet) and a war veteran (Dennis Morgan), she scrambles to keep up the ruse of her "happy homemaker" image.Funny Christmas romantic comedy helped by a superb cast.
Barbara Stanwyck (Mrs Lane) is a popular journalist on Sydney Greenstreet's (Yardley) magazine who specializes in homely life articles from her farm in Connecticut with her husband and baby.
Christmas in Connecticut (1945) *** (out of 4) Delightful comedy about a female journalist (Barbara Stanwyck) who writes a column claiming to be a great wife, mother and cook.
Love Barbara Stanwyck, SZ Sakall, Sidney Greenstreet, Dennis Morgan, Robert Shayne (Superman's police chief), the housekeeper, the waiter at Restaurant Felix, and the judge......I can go on and on.
Christmas Con Job. I've always liked Barbara Stanwyck who was, perhaps, the hardest working lead actress of the 30's and 40's although few of her movie roles are memorable.
It does, however, have Stanwyck and Dennis Morgan as well as some supreme character actors including Sydney Greenstreet and S.K. Sakall so there are plot twists and funny moments which undoubtedly seemed more real in 1945 than they do today.
To begin, the plot concerns a magazine writer (Stanwyck) who the magazine's readers believe is a domestic goddess, married with a child and living on a farm in Connecticut but who is really single, lives in New York City and knows nothing about cooking or homemaking.
Apparently, and even the owner of the magazine (Greenstreet) is deceived although one would think that he would have long since seen though the deception but the story moves on and Stanwyck, Greenstreet, a sailor recently survived from his sunken ship (Morgan) and Stanwyck's restaurateur friend (S.Z.Sakall) find themselves spending Christmas in Connecticut at a farm belonging to Stanwyck's boorish boyfriend (Reginald Gardiner).
The good guy gets the girl and presumably they live happily ever after.I watch this movie every year at Christmas to enjoy these character actors at their best in a story that reflects way it was in 1945 and because of a long held fascination with Barbara Stanwyck.
Christmas in Connecticut is a story about Elizabeth Lane (Barbara Stanwyck) is a single food writer living in New York whose articles about her fictitious Connecticut farm, husband and baby are admired by housewives across the country.
Her publisher, Alexander Yardley (Sydney Greenstreet), is unaware of the charade and insists that Elizabeth host a Christmas dinner for returning war hero Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan), who read all of her recipes while in the hospital, and is so fond of her that his nurse wrote a letter to the publisher.
So, when her publisher arranges a good-will publicity campaign for her to have a war hero over to her Connecticut home for Christmas dinner, she's got to hire a pretend family-and learn how to cook-fast!With Barbara Stanwyck perfect in a role reminiscent of Woman of the Year, Dennis Morgan as the returning war hero, and Sydney Greenstreet as the unsuspecting publisher, this is a great flick to rent during the holiday season.
Both films involve deception: here, Stanwyck is ostensibly a famous cook contributing to a top monthly magazine, married with children and living on a Connecticut farm; however, she is none of these things, depending for her recipes on Hungarian chef and restaurateur S.Z. Sakall.
In this holiday film, Christmas in Connecticut, she is delightfully paired with Dennis Morgan and the incomparable Sydney Greenstreet and a wonderful supporting cast that includes Una O'Connor and S.Z. Sakall.
See the movie to find out what havoc ensues.There's a good cast all around, especially Dennis Morgan as the sailor and Sidney Greenstreet as the stuffy magazine executive who just sees Christmas as a business opportunity until all the screwball comedy loose ends get tied together on Christmas Day. S.Z. Sakall and Una O'Connor have big comic supporting roles as well.
Christmas in ConnecticutWhen cooking tofurky for Christmas remember to baste it in Nyquil to get that tryptophan feeling.Or, you can do like the journalist in this comedy and tell your cook to do it.Writing bogus copy about her husband, child and Connecticut farmhouse, food columnist Elizabeth (Barbara Stanwyck) must now materialize these lies to host a war-hero (Dennis Morgan) for Christmas dinner - at the behest of her oblivious publisher (Sydney Greenstreet).Marrying a friend (Reginald Gardiner) who owns a country house, hiring a chef (S.Z. Sakall) and borrowing a baby, she plays house with great incompetence.
It stars Barbara Stanwyck, Dennis Morgan, Sydney Greenstreet & Reginald Gardiner.Plot sees Stanwyck as Elizabeth Lane, a successful writer of a love, marriage and food column for popular Smart Housekeeping magazine.
Had they a stronger actor in the lead than Dennis Morgan, it would be a perfect film, but it's still a wonderful Christmas perennial and favourite to watch.
Despite some problems with the screenplay, it is a good film, and usually revived in the Christmas season.Elizabeth Lane (Barbara Stanwyck) writes a column in "American Housekeeping" magazine for Yardley, where she gives household tips and cooking recipes.
Barbara Stanwyck is a sheer delight in this wartime comedy, about a sailor invited to spend Christmas with a popular magazine writer's family, at her farm in Connecticut.
The problem is she has no husband, baby, or farm, as she writes about in her column, and she can't even cook; her wonderful recipes being provided for her by her good friend " Uncle" Felix, owner of a Hungarian restaurant in New York City.Things get even more complicated when her strict publisher boss invites himself along for Christmas.
But when the handsome young sailor arrives on Christmas Eve, romantic complications ensue, as the supposedly married author falls like a ton of bricks for the nice guy Navy man and vice versa.This is a charming, warm film that deftly balances humor with sentiment and is a wonderful showcase for Barbara Stanwyck to display her considerable comedic talent, aided by such marvelous character actors as Sydney Greenstreet, Una O'Connor, S.Z.Sakall, and many others.
Her publisher, Mr. Alexander Yardley (a brilliant comic turn by Sydney Greenstreet) gets the bright idea of inviting a famous war hero to Elizabeth's "perfect farm" for the Christmas holiday.
There's some things I certainly love about Christmas In Connecticut, but Barbara Stanwyck really isn't at the top of the list.
It instead portrayal a romantic screwball type humor film with its main character, writer, Elizabeth Lane (Barbara Stanwyck) having to hide the true details of her real life, while living a fake fantasy one, in order to please her boss, magazine publisher Alexander Yardley (Sydney Greenstreet) & home guest, sailor Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan), into believing that she truly does live the life of her famous column home wife persona.
Barbara Stanwyck is Elizabeth Lane, Dennis Morgan is Jefferson Jones, Sydney Greenstreet is Alexander Yardley, S.Z.
At Christmas time, her boss, Alexander Yardley (Sydney Greenstreet) asks her to invite a young weakened sailor in the Connecticut farm she write about.