Christmas in Connecticut

1945's CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT is as airy as cotton candy and easy to ingest as sugar cookies, though features a surprisingly progressive character sketch of its female lead, appealingly played by Barbara Stanwyck.  For its time, anyway.  A woman who refuses to be roped into marriage merely for a life of security, and even saves six months' worth of her own wages for a mink coat.  A free spirit named Elizabeth Lane who is employed as a food writer and creates the illusion of a life on a Connecticut farm with husband and a child.  Housewives across the U.S. eat it up, as does her publisher, a blowhard named Alexander Yardley (Sydney Greenstreet) who is unaware of the charade.  

Complications abound when Yardley orders Elizabeth to honor the request of a recent WWII Naval hero/eligible bachelor named Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan) for an old fashioned Christmas dinner on that farm, the kind he read about in her column.  Miss Lane lives in a Manhattan flat and can't cook to save her life.  She has no husband or child, but in an effort to avoid disaster (and unemployment) conspires to marry her lovelorn dullard friend John (Reginald Gardiner) who happens to own a farm in Connecticut.  She's resigned to a life without true love when Jeff arrives, and you don't fake the sort of looks they give each other.

Can Elizabeth and her friend, master chef/restauranteur Felix (S.Z. Sakall) - who gave her all her recipes - keep the ruse going through Christmas? Will the poor Judge Crothers (Dick Elliott) ever get to marry Elizabeth and John without interruption? Will Elizabeth tell Jeff that she really isn't married? Will she be able to flip a pancake to everyone's satisfaction?

Director Peter Godfrey swiftly moves the action along, entertainingly realizing the myriad comic dilemmas in Lionel Houser and Adele Comandini's screenplay; I haven't revealed them all.   He and his actors display splendid timing and just the right committment to what is essentially a silly exercise.  Christmas is merely a pleasant backdrop rather than integral to the storyline, but isn't that true of several "Christmas" movies? This does not keep it from being great fun, a nice pairing with hot cocoa during the season.

Stanwyck is lovely, never once playing it as anything but real.  Refreshingly unglamorous.  But Greeenstreet and Sakall own CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT, each taking caricatures to the zenith on their own before sharing some sidesplitting scenes later on.  Both are a treat to watch and really distinguish this movie.