The romancin's rosy and the fun's furious and everybody's going to be there! You're invited!
Christmas in Connecticut (1945)
While recovering in a hospital, war hero Jefferson Jones grows familiar with the "Diary of a Housewife" column written by Elizabeth Lane. Jeff's nurse arranges with Elizabeth's publisher, Alexander Yardley, for Jeff to spend the holiday at Elizabeth's bucolic Connecticut farm with her husband and child. But the column is a sham, so Elizabeth and her editor, Dudley Beecham, in fear of losing their jobs, hasten to set up the single, childless and entirely nondomestic Elizabeth on a country farm.
rating 7/10 User rating 170 votes 70% ❄ Christmas Connection
The entire plot hinges on a magazine columnist being forced to host a Christmas dinner she can't actually cook. Christmas is the engine driving every lie, every complication, and every romantic twist in the story.
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Our Review
Barbara Stanwyck couldn't cook. That's not gossip about the actress herself, but the entire premise of Christmas in Connecticut, Warner Bros.' 1945 screwball comedy that turns a fraudulent food column into holiday chaos. Stanwyck plays Elizabeth Lane, a magazine writer whose column paints a picture of domestic perfection: a Connecticut farmhouse, a loving husband, a baby, and a kitchen full of homemade magic. None of it exists. She lives in a Manhattan apartment and eats at restaurants.
The Plot Behind the Perfect Christmas Dinner
The trouble starts when Alexander Yardley (Sydney Greenstreet), Elizabeth's bombastic publisher, decides she must host a returning war hero for Christmas at her Connecticut farm. The war hero is Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan), a Navy sailor who spent 18 days on a life raft in the Pacific and developed a fixation on Elizabeth's descriptions of roast goose and flaming plum pudding. Yardley wants a publicity stunt. Elizabeth wants to keep her job. The problem is that the farmhouse, the husband, the baby, and the cooking skills are all fiction.
What follows is a cascade of improvised lies. Elizabeth's friend Felix (S.Z. Sakall), a Hungarian restaurateur who secretly writes all her recipes, agrees to lend his Connecticut house for the weekend. A borrowed baby appears. An architect named John Sloan (Reginald Gardiner) is drafted into playing the husband. And Jefferson Jones, the oblivious guest of honor, keeps falling for Elizabeth while she scrambles to maintain the charade.
Barbara Stanwyck and the Cast of Christmas in Connecticut
Stanwyck was already one of Hollywood's biggest stars in 1945, coming off Double Indemnity the year before, where she played a murderous femme fatale. The shift to light comedy suited her perfectly. She plays Elizabeth with a knowing wit, a woman smart enough to sustain an elaborate fraud but human enough to get tangled in it. The physical comedy of pretending to cook while Felix frantically does the real work behind her back is genuinely funny, largely because Stanwyck commits to the absurdity without mugging.
Sydney Greenstreet, best known as the sinister Kasper Gutman in The Maltese Falcon, is pure bluster as Yardley. He eats everything in sight, barks orders, and remains magnificently oblivious to the disaster unfolding around him. S.Z. Sakall brings his usual warmth as Felix. Dennis Morgan is charming enough as the love interest, though the script doesn't ask much of him beyond being handsome and confused.
The real chemistry is between Stanwyck and the situation. She's playing a competent woman trapped in an incompetent lie, and the comedy comes from watching someone smart dig herself deeper.
A 1945 Christmas Movie That Still Works
Director Peter Godfrey keeps the pace brisk at 101 minutes. The film was shot entirely on Warner Bros. soundstages in Burbank, and the Connecticut farmhouse looks exactly like a Hollywood set: too clean, too spacious, perpetually dusted with fake snow. None of that matters. Screwball comedy runs on dialogue and timing, not realism.
The Christmas setting serves the plot rather than dominating it. There are no extended carol-singing sequences or sentimental speeches about the meaning of the holiday. Christmas is simply the occasion that forces Elizabeth into her most desperate performance. The dinner table scenes, where she must pretend to have cooked a feast that Felix prepared, are the comedic high point.
Modern audiences sometimes compare the premise to social media culture, where curated online personas bear little resemblance to reality. Elizabeth Lane was essentially an Instagram influencer in 1945, projecting a lifestyle she didn't live. The comparison is apt, if a little obvious.
What Holds It Back
The romance is the weakest thread. Jefferson Jones falls for Elizabeth almost immediately, and the film never creates real doubt about the outcome. The "husband" subplot with John Sloan generates some tension, but Reginald Gardiner's character is too obviously wrong for Elizabeth to create genuine stakes. You know where this is going from the first reel.
The pacing also sags slightly in the second act, when the film repeats variations of the same gag: Elizabeth almost gets caught, Felix saves her, Yardley remains clueless. By the third time, the pattern is visible. The film recovers in its final 20 minutes with a genuinely funny chase sequence involving a horse-drawn sleigh.
Still, at its best, Christmas in Connecticut is a reminder that the screwball comedy formula works when you cast it right. Stanwyck alone makes it worth watching.
Fun Facts
Warner Bros. originally considered Bette Davis for the lead role before casting Barbara Stanwyck.
S.Z. Sakall, who plays Felix, was a Hungarian actor who fled Europe in 1939. He lost three sisters in concentration camps during World War II.
The film was a box office success in 1945, ranking among Warner Bros.' top earners that year, but received no Academy Award nominations.
A television remake aired in 1992, directed by Arnold Schwarzenegger and starring Dyan Cannon. It was widely panned.
Barbara Stanwyck reportedly did all her own "bad cooking" scenes without a double, deliberately botching kitchen tasks for comic effect.
Sydney Greenstreet weighed over 280 pounds during filming, and the script was rewritten to include extra eating scenes that played to his imposing physical presence.
The Connecticut farmhouse set was reused in several other Warner Bros. productions throughout the late 1940s.
Cast
