Christmas In Connecticut

As promised... a film review of a film you have probably not seen! Probably not heard of! But is it great!

I think what I will do is post the Amazon review (nice and short, to the point) and then add my thoughts!

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Amazon.com Essentials: This is a holiday film that plays 365 days of the year. Barbara Stanwyck gives a brilliant, sardonic performance as Elizabeth Lane, a columnist for Smart Housekeeping magazine, whose enticing descriptions of the exquisite meals she prepares for her husband and baby on their bucolic Connecticut farm earns her fame as "America's Best Cook." A writer, she is; a cook, she is not. As she types the words, "From my living room window, as I write, the good cedar logs cracking on the fire..." the view is of clothes flapping on the line outside her bachelorette Manhattan apartment. An able supporting cast keeps her lie on life support: her editor, her stuffy and detestable architect suitor, and the wonderful "Uncle" Felix (S.Z. Sakall), an English-garbling Hungarian chef who provides the recipes that fill her column.

Cut to Jefferson Jones, a sailor adrift at sea for weeks after his destroyer is torpedoed. Memories of the food described in Lane's columns are central to his survival. After his rescue, as he's recuperating in a naval hospital, a marriage-minded nurse thinks she might nudge Jones to the altar if he could only experience a real domestic Christmas. And it just so happens that she was nurse to the grandchild of Alexander Yardley, the wealthy and powerful publisher of --you guessed it--Smart Housekeeping magazine. And so, she pens the letter that could unravel Lane's carefully constructed fraud. She writes to Yardley asking that Jones be included in America's ultimate Christmas--the one to be held at the Lane family farm in Connecticut. The pompous Yardley (ably portrayed by Sidney Greenstreet) believes the Lane myth and instantly sniffs a story that will send his magazine's circulation skyrocketing. And staring down a lonely holiday, he decides to join the Lanes for Christmas on the farm, too. Now, all Lane has to do is come up with a farm. And a husband. And let's not forget the baby. Christmas in Connecticut is classic screwball entertainment of the best kind, with its on-target skewering of social convention and house-of- cards-about-to-tumble tension: a perfect farcical vision of domestic blitz. --Susan Benson
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What really makes this film is the performances. The plot, though very screwball-ish, is somewhat predictable. But the dialogue and the performances are fabulous. Stanwyck is great as the heroine. Morgan is great opposite her. Greenstreet is perfect as Yardley, he has the commanding presence that a newspaper tycoon should have, but the joviality that makes him likable.

S.Z. Sakall is wonderful as Felix. He has an outrageous accent, and he has GREAT lines. The whole thing is just... wonderful.

One of my favorite moments is the little scene where Gardner is proposing to Stanwyck, while Felix is serving the buffet dinner...:)

I have always liked this movie. It is funny, not just sentimental. Most Christmas movies are kind of... well, bubbly and joyful, but this one is sarcastic and sardonic. Very worthwhile. Rent it tonight and everything will be "hunky dunky"!