Set your DVR now
Turner Classic Movies will air “Christmas In Connecticut,” about which I blog at least once every holiday season, at 11 a.m. Central time on Sunday, Dec. 6. Set those DVRs now, before you forget it.
Most classic movie fans know about this 1945 movie, but I’m always surprised at the people who don’t know about it — or have only seen it in bits and pieces, like a co-worker who ran across it in the middle last year and recognized it from my blithering.
It’s really more of a romantic comedy than a holiday movie, but because of the setting and the title we’ll treat it as a holiday movie.
Here’s the basic premise: Elizabeth Lane (Barbara Stanwyck) is a Martha Stewart-like columnist for a top magazine. She writes gorgeous prose about the Connecticut farm she shares with her husband and their precious little baby, and her delicious recipes are looked forward to by readers nationwide.
She’s a complete fraud — single, living in a Manhattan apartment, and she can’t cook. All of the recipes come from her restaurateur uncle, Felix. Felix is played by S.Z. Sakall, sometimes billed as “Cuddles” Sakall, who is best known as Carl, the lovable maître d’ in “Casablanca.” Her immediate supervisor knows she’s a fake, but the pompous publisher (Sydney Greenstreet) doesn’t.
When the publisher hears about a war hero without a place to spend the holidays, he suggests that Elizabeth Lane and her husband host him at their Connecticut farm. He also invites himself over for Christmas dinner.
So, in order to keep her job (and the mink coat she just bought on credit), she must come up with a farm, a husband and a baby — and of course, this being a Hollywood movie, she eventually finds herself attracted to the war hero (Dennis Morgan), further muddying the waters.
It’s a funny movie, and if you haven’t seen it you need to.
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