Christmas in Connecticut (1945)

Review Essay

Relationships to films are complicated—today’s entry, Christmas in Connecticut, being a helpful illustration in my own life—since so much depends not just on the contents of the movie itself but on who we are in the moment we’re watching, what we’re prepared to see in a work of art, and what expectations we bring to the experience.  I first watched this film years ago, and found it underwhelming at the time: I was just getting started on this fascination with holiday movies that led to the blog you’re reading, and I think the title (and some of the advance praise I’d read) made me think this would be an instant classic.  When it wasn’t, I set it on the heap of “fine, I guess” films, and I hadn’t re-examined that rating until my recent viewing.  To my pleasant surprise, I found myself really engaged by Christmas in Connecticut, and excited to share it with you all.  I can see both sides of this movie, that’s for sure, and I’ll try to make them both clear by the end.

How well all this works for you is going to depend a lot on your interest in / patience with the particular tropes and style of a 1940s rom-com, an era and genre to which, as experienced readers of the blog will know, I’m pretty susceptible.  Since the first time I watched this movie, I’ve seen a lot more of them, and I think that’s a big factor in my warming up to this movie on a second viewing: I mean, Barbara Stanwyck’s a highlight of anything she’s in, and here she manages the quirky charm of a woman who plans to bluff her way to success with a pair of deuces in her hand just about perfectly.  Even in black and white, her Edith Head costumes are as striking as ever.  More surprising to me is how skillfully Dennis Morgan as war hero Jefferson Jones plays off of her—Morgan’s career was mostly made up of roles where he’s the likeable square who loses the girl to a slightly grittier star (like Humphrey Bogart), but the structure of the screenplay here allows him to play that same naive persona as the star.  In this film, Lane’s already got the attentions of the brandy-drinking sophisticate in John Sloan, but what warms her heart is the corn-fed friendliness of a Midwestern boy who cheerfully offers to bathe and diaper the baby (an infant on loan in a hasty arrangement that is definitely not going to backfire spectacularly on Elizabeth, who holds the child like it’s a radioactive parcel) and spends his after-dinner energy sitting at the piano, warbling out Christmas carols and old love songs in an angelic tenor.  Sloan owns the farm, but Jones is the guy who seems at home there, in the fantasy world Lane never figured she could have (and is only slowly realizing she might want).  Stanwyck and Morgan’s flirtatious and furtive conversations crackle with romance long before it’s clear how they could possibly pair up, since the whole premise of their meeting is that she’s “happily married” and likely to remain so.  They’re fantastic.

The supporting cast are no slouches, either—Lane’s performance of the perfect Christmas is under the microscope thanks to the presence of her domineering publisher, Alexander Yardley, played with gleeful pomposity by Sydney Greenstreet, and she’s only pulling off the illusion of ideal domesticity thanks to the help of Felix Bessenak (“Uncle Felix” as she calls him, to maintain the cover story), the bespectacled Hungarian immigrant who runs a delicious New York City restaurant on the ground floor of the apartment Lane lives in, and who reluctantly agrees to come out to the farm to whip up a Christmas to remember.  Felix is maybe my favorite character (and in a movie starring Barbara Stanwyck, that’s saying something)—like a benevolent trickster spirit, Felix manages to be in the right place at the right time every step of the way to prevent Elizabeth from tying herself down in a marriage he knows she doesn’t really want, and to keep all options open for her to have a happy future.  He’s generous and joyful, while also having a sassy edge to him that plays really well on camera, and after learning the English word “catastrophe”, he takes great delight in declaring any kind of even mild difficulty as a “cat-as-TROAFF” (as he pronounces it).  S. Z. Sakall, who plays the part of Felix, was himself a Hungarian immigrant, and one who had narrowly avoided disaster fleeing his homeland in 1940—several close family members remained there, and died in Hitler’s concentration camps—and knowing that adds a layer of wonder for me as an audience member, watching an immigrant actor who’d known such grief become such an integral and happy part of this quintessentially American story.  Maybe it’s just that it’s 2025, and I feel a special debt these days to refugees and asylum seekers from around the globe who’ve given so much to make my country the vibrant place that it is.

What doesn’t work here?  Well, the thing I struggled with on my first viewing hasn’t really gotten better, and that’s the fact that there’s not all that much of a plot.  It’s obvious from early on that we’re being given an incredibly complicated Rube Goldberg device to orchestrate something pretty simple—Elizabeth and Jeff are going to fall for each other, but in a context where they just can’t really admit that openly, and we get the slightly illicit good time of rooting for Jeff to kiss a “married woman” and/or rooting for Elizabeth to throw herself at a guy she will eventually figure out has a fiancee waiting for him back at the hospital.  As a result, to the extent that we have a plot, it’s a farce, but really great farce requires pretty impeccably tight writing to make the tension wind itself up more and more as scenes progress, and this is a much more languid screenplay than that.  We have to accept a lot of strange coincidences and impulsive choices by characters to generate the necessary narrative energy and reach the resolutions we know we’re rooting for.  I’d also say that it’s a story with very little character development: the changes in any of the people on screen are subtle, from my perspective, and this is more about well-defined characters overcoming the plot obstacles in their path than it is about characters coming to learn something about themselves and grow.  I don’t think that makes a film bad, but if you’re looking for deeper emotional resonance, there won’t be as much here as I think there easily could have been.  And of course, in any film of the era, some of the dialogue is going to be corny: for me the worst example is Jeff trying to dole out advice about “how to rock in a rocking chair” but your mileage may vary.

There’s a lot here to enjoy, though.  For one thing, I applaud any movie of this era that handles race well in even a limited way, and this film gets high marks for its context: in the first act, there are two Black performers with speaking parts, and they’re both depicted positively and without stereotypes (a confident and efficient deliverywoman with a package for Elizabeth, and then an erudite young waiter who informs his boss, Felix, of the definition and Greek etymology of the word “catastrophe”).  Felix, too, really is playing the part of a minority, in this era, and while the movie’s having a little fun with his exclamations of “catastroph!” he’s not the butt of jokes as an outsider—as I noted, to the contrary, he’s almost the film’s ultimate insider, embraced and appreciated for who he is by basically everyone he encounters (other than perhaps Sloan’s Irish housekeeper, Nora).  Sure, I’m praising fairly limited progress on diversity in film, but given that it’s 1945 (and remembering other films of this vintage that I’ve seen) I’m grateful for what’s here.  Also, in terms of gender politics, it’s ahead of its time, or at least I was really pleasantly surprised that nobody in the film shames Elizabeth when it’s revealed she doesn’t really know how to care for an infant or cook.  Jeff’s jumping in to help with the baby is treated as natural and positive—he doesn’t consider it “women’s work,” and the only reason Elizabeth feels uneasy about it is her need to play her persona as Happy Homemaker and not the mere fact of her gender.  It’s hard not to feel affection for basically everyone on screen, and the folks who have done the most to deserve a little comeuppance do get it, though even this movie’s harshest consequences are pretty gentle.  Show up to just spend time with these characters, and you’ll get a good evening at the movies.

I Know That Face: We’ve got to acknowledge out of the gate that this is yet another film starring Barbara Stanwyck, arguably the queen of ‘40s Christmas movies, given her role as the guarded, wounded Lee Leander in Remember the Night, which I covered last year on the blog, and as the savvy, ambitious Ann Mitchell, the reporter to invites America to Meet John Doe, a movie I’ll be covering here before the month is out.  The man playing her alleged husband, John Sloan, in this film is one Reginald Gardner, who’d appeared as the writer Beverly Carlton in 1941’s The Man Who Came to Dinner, a screwball Christmas comedy that’s absolutely on my longlist and which I’m hoping I’ll get to in 2026.  S. Z. Sakall, who in this movie is my beloved “Uncle Felix”, will show up in 1949’s In the Good Old Summertime, a remake of The Shop Around the Corner which I glowingly reviewed last year: he plays Otto Oberkugen, the owner of Oberkugen’s Music Store, in that film, and his name appears in the end credits as “S. Z. ‘Cuddles’ Sakall.”  Maybe everybody loved this guy?  And lastly, I would be falling down on the job if I didn’t help you figure out why Judge Crowthers, who keeps showing up to try to perform a quick at-home wedding ceremony for Sloan and Lane, feels so familiar…I was sure I’d seen him somewhere.  Well, it turns out, that actor, Dick Elliott, makes a brief uncredited appearance the following year in a little movie called It’s a Wonderful Life, in which he is the man sitting on his porch who tells George Bailey to “kiss the girl instead of talking her to death,” before complaining loudly that “youth is wasted on the wrong people”.  What a legend.

That Takes Me Back: Obviously it’s always at least slightly jarring in films set before the 1990s how socially accepted smoking is at all times and in all places, but even so, it was especially wild to me to see Jeff smoking a cigarette in the hospital while being pushed around the recovery ward in a wheelchair.  Times have changed.  Shortly thereafter, Mary Lee, Jeff’s nurse fiancee, manages to secure the favor of a Christmas in Connecticut for her beau by reminding Mr. Yardley that she helped save his granddaughter when she was suffering from measles…a reminder of the past, yes, and also of the disease-riddled future the nation’s Health and Human Services Secretary dreams of at night, but I guess in polite company we’re supposed to pretend that the death and disability of children is just another of those political matters we shouldn’t mention at the Christmas table.  Apologies if it bothers you that I’m bringing it up anyway.  Speaking of things inhumane, it is always a little fascinating to me how luxurious and universally appealing furs were, in this era: I’m not going to throw paint at anybody, and obviously a vintage fur isn’t doing any additional harm on its own (those animals are long gone), but what little I know of the conditions under which mink fur coats were made suggests to me that maybe it’s nice they’re no longer considered the gold standard of wealth.

I Understood That Reference: I didn’t catch any references to any Christmas stories or poems, myself, which is at least slightly surprising.

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Holiday Vibes (4.5/10): It is honestly kind of surprising how little holiday content is worked into a film that’s allegedly about giving a man a classic Christmas experience.  But we skip past a lot: we don’t sit for Christmas dinner, we don’t open gifts around the tree, we don’t go caroling, etc.  There’s definitely some pieces that are seasonal, with sleigh rides everywhere (as though the automobile has yet to reach rural Connecticut by 1945) and at least one scene of tree trimming, and a community dance on Christmas evening.  Really the movie’s energy is far less given to the holiday than it is to the mechanics of the plot devices—how to get Elizabeth and Jeff into a room together to flirt unobserved, how to heighten the comedic tension of things that will expose the lies, etc.  I am pretty sure this was a flaw in the movie for me the first time I watched it, since the title seems to promise a totally Yuletide extravaganza, so I’d advise you to keep expectations moderate on this front.

Actual Quality (9/10): So, this isn’t high art, but it is a confection—sweet and lighthearted and designed to gallop us through six crises quickly enough that they don’t inflict much stress.  We know where we’re going, and we get there comfortably.  There are just so many great performers here who can do a lot with even fairly pedestrian dialogue, and the setting couldn’t be more charming, with lavishly furnished 1940s glamour constantly intruded on by wandering cows and the needs of a countryside that’s mostly oriented around doing war work.  I had a great time with it this time around, and even though I know why I didn’t love my first viewing (and why I know some of you likely won’t love it either), I think this is the best assessment of how well the movie’s doing what it’s setting out to do.

Party Mood-Setter?  It’s hard to casually view a farce given the need to understand context in order to follow a lot of each scene’s potential humor, and there’s not quite enough holiday scenery for this to be a great background for a Christmas party or something similar.  If you know it well enough that it’s a film you know well, though, the energy of it is so cheerful that perhaps you could find the right time to throw it on while you’re working on something.

Plucked Heart Strings?  The film’s emotional only to the extent that there’s some pretty great chemistry between Elizabeth and Jeff, but it’s not a film that puts a lump in your throat out of either sadness or joy.  If you want the release of a little tearful delight, I think you’d need a different movie.

Recommended Frequency: Like I said above, it grows on you!  It’s working its way into my rotation, though, now that I think I’ve figured out the ways it works (and the things not to worry about).  I definitely intend to make it a regular (if not annual) part of my holiday viewing.

Christmas in Connecticut is a little frustratingly inaccessible compared to some other films on the slate this year: you can rent it from almost any of the streaming services, but only at the rate of $4.99, which to me is a trifle higher than I like to pay for a streaming rental.  You may want to consider picking up a Blu-ray or DVD copy at Barnes and Noble, given the relative difference in price, honestly—that or just do what I did, and get it on disc from your local library, of which some 1,200+ have it on the shelves, according to Worldcat.  I will say, though, if your only access to it is the streaming rental, I don’t think $5 would be too high a price to pay, if it sounds like your kind of movie: if I hadn’t had it at my local library, I wouldn’t have felt cheated at that amount to have streamed it, myself.