25 Days of Christmas | Christmas in Connecticut, 1945

Christmas in Connecticut | 1945

“From my living room window as I write... I can look out across the broad front lawns of our farm like a lovely picture postcard of wintry New England. In my fireplace, the good cedar logs are burning and crackling. I just stopped to go into my gleaming kitchen to test the crumbly brown goodness of the toasted veal cutlets in my oven. Cook these slowly.” 

 Those are the first few lines of Elizabeth Lane’s next article. She’s a food writer whose articles about her exciting new recipes, featuring details of her life in a farm in Connecticut with her husband and baby, are admired by Americans across the country. Little do they know, Elizabeth’s paper life is actually a farce. In fact, as she writes those lines early in the movie, the young single woman is sitting in her small apartment in New York City. The view from her window is nothing but the stone wall of another building and some clothes lines. Her crackling fireplace is a heater puffing smoke. There is no baby anywhere in sight. Oh, and she can’t cook. She writes about recipes brought to her by a friend, the culinary chef Felix, who owns a small restaurant in New York. 

 But life has been good lately. Elizabeth’s writing is widely popular, her admirers send her gifts on the mail and she has just gotten a new mink coat which will cost six months of her salary.

"The things a girl will do for a mink coat."

Very few people know what Elizabeth’s real life is like. Even her publisher, Alexander Yardley is completely unaware of Elizabeth’s charade. In fact, he is one of the admirers of Elizabeth and her cooking articles are the one thing he follows in his own publications. 

But mr. Yardley also happens to be a “stickler for the truth”, who asks only two things of his editors: “Print the truth and obey my orders”. If he should ever discover that Elizabeth’s articles are full of lies she would be fired for sure. 

 There’s no danger of that happening until mr. Yardley receives a letter from a young nurse who looked after his granddaughter when she was very ill. The nurse brings to his attention that there’s a young man, Jefferson Jones, a returning war hero, who lying in hospital reads all of Elizabeth’s recipes and is very fond of her. In fact, it would mean the world to him to be invited to her farm for Christmas. Believing that the headline "American Hero Spends Christmas on Perfect Farm" will be a perfect story for their next issue, and looking forward to tasting Elizabeth’s food, of course, Yardley decides to call the famous writer.

When the publisher insists that Elizabeth should host a Christmas dinner to Jefferson Jones, Elizabeth is in trouble. Facing a career-ending scandal for her and her editor, Dudley Beecham (Robert Shayne), she has no choice but to comply… 

 That’s when John Sloan comes into the play. John is a friend of Elizabeth who has made several proposals already and been refused each time. He doesn’t seem to mind that Elizabeth doesn’t love him, he believes that these things come in good time and that he will be patient enough to wait that long as long as they’re married. And he happens to have a farm in Connecticut… So he has an idea: Elizabeth marries him, moves to the farm and they host the Christmas dinner she so desperately needs. They can pretend to have been married for a much longer time. There’s a neighbor’s baby they can pretend to be their own. And Felix would be happy to accompany Elizabeth and cook the Christmas menu. Cornered, Elizabeth says yes… 

 She could not have anticipated that Quartermaster Jones would be so charming… And when all of them are in the farm, chaos begins…

The two of them spending time together. As it turns out, Jones knows a great deal more about babies than she does. It seems as though Elizabeth and Jefferson fall in love at first sight the moment he walks in the door, in spite of the fact that to him she’s a married woman (and that she has agreed to marry John). And even that knowledge doesn’t stop them from dancing together, or joy-riding a Christmas sleight.  

Christmas in Connecticut is the first of a long list of Christmas films released after the II World War… The stories even include former soldiers looking for a place in the world after the conflict (It happened on 5th avenue, White Christmas), widows whose husbands perished at the War (Holliday affair), or, in this case, a navy man who is recovering, just after he got back. Elizabeth’s character also highlights the time in which the movie was made in the sense that she is very much a practical woman in a time when pragmatism was a necessity. Back in the 1940s, times were hard and a single girl had to be resourceful to make a living… And if that meant coming up with an imaginary farm in Connecticut, so be it. 

There is also something to be said about what a great movie heroine she is. Modern society sometimes likes to believe that the strong female characters are a contemporary invention, but this is a film from 1945 with a lead character who’s strong, brave and intelligent, however clueless. Furthermore, Elizabeth’s character is written and played in a way that makes her very endearing, and although it could be said that she brought her predicaments upon herself with her lies, we root for her all the way.

The scene in which Jefferson plays the piano, singing Christmas Carols while Elizabeth fixes the tree is particularly nice. The romance is a bit silly, but that doesn’t matter very much.  

Elizabeth even tries to get out of hosting the dinner, but she fails (her publisher is one of those men who barely lets the other person speak) in spite of her good intentions. The trouble is of course, that although she has described a most harmonious family life with her child in her articles she doesn’t know the first thing about babies, or cooking or anything else. She can’t even flip pancakes! And as if juggling all those lies and guests wasn’t enough, John keeps summoning the judge to perform an inpromptu marriage ceremony in secret, and Elizabeth, keeps trying to get out of it. 

 The story is very light-hearted, full of improbable misunderstandings that make it immensely funny. I read there was a remake of this movie in the 1990s, but, only having seen the original, it seems to me like any remake would be completely unnecessary.

Christmas in Connecticut | 1945 | 102’ | Directed by Peter Godfrey | Script by Lionel Houser, Adele Comandini, Aileen Hamilton | Barbara Stanwyck, Dennis Morgan, Sydney Greenstreet | USA