Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.0

Christmas in Connecticut Blu-ray Movie Review

It's a Wonderful Career

Reviewed by Michael Reuben November 9, 2014

I doubt that its makers intended this, but the 1945 holiday comedy Christmas in Connecticut has a slyly subversive streak. If one leaves aside the relatively recent phenomenon of cynical anti-Christmas films like Bad Santa, Yuletide fare generally centers on family. From It's a Wonderful Life, to any iteration one may choose of A Christmas Carol (including Bill Murray's modern version, Scrooged), to the slapstick chaos of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, to the aptly titled The Family Man, both Christmas and Christmas movies are about surrounding oneself with family, either literally or by adoption (as Scrooge adopts the Cratchits). But not Christmas in Connecticut. The film's central character is a career woman who has steadfastly rejected family life, while spinning idyllic (and totally fraudulent) tales of a Norman Rockwell country existence as a housewife and mother to boost the circulation of a ladies' magazine. When her secret is threatened with exposure one holiday season, screwball comedy ensues.

The legendary Barbara Stanwyck, who was equally adept at comedy and drama, plays magazine writer Elizabeth Lane, who rarely sets foot outside Manhattan, but from her city residence has invented an alternate reality for a monthly column called "Diary of a Housewife". As far as her readers are concerned, she lives in a picture-perfect country farmhouse filled with charming antiques, where she prepares gourmet meals for her adoring husband. Elizabeth herself can't boil water, and all her recipes come from her friend Felix Bassenak (S.Z. Sakall, who played Rick's bartender in Casablanca), a Hungarian emigré with a successful restaurant around the corner from Elizabeth's apartment. When Elizabeth added a baby to the mix to accentuate the air of domesticity, the magazine's circulation doubled.

The flaw in this arrangement is that Elizabeth's publisher, the wealthy Alexander Yardley (Sydney Greenstreet, "The Fat Man" in The Maltese Falcon), doesn't know that his most popular feature is a hoax cooked up by Elizabeth and her editor, Dudley Beecham (Robert Shayne, who would later play Inspector Henderson on TV's Superman ). In this quaintly old-fashioned era, Yardley insists on truthfulness. If he ever learns how Elizabeth really lives, she and Dudley will both be fired.

What could possibly go wrong? Nothing, except for the lengthy setup that occupies the film's first quarter hour and probably would never survive today's development process. Christmas in Connecticut was a wartime film, even though Nazi Germany had surrendered by the time it was released (and Japan surrendered just afterward). The film's opening involves a Navy survivor of a battle at sea, Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan), who spent days in a life raft dreaming of the gourmet meals he'd eat if he was ever rescued. Recovering in the hospital, he discovers Elizabeth's columns and falls in love with her menus. Through contrivances that could only happen in the movies, Jones comes to the attention of Mr. Yardley, who insists that his prized author invite the young war hero to her home for dinner on Christmas Eve. Indeed, Yardley will join them, since none of his family is in town.

Having moved all these unlikely pieces into place, director Peter Godfrey (Cry Wolf) has an ideal setup for a Christmas where no one will have time to celebrate, because they're too busy scrambling to shore up the multiple deceptions that Elizabeth's editor persuades her to undertake to save their jobs. It turns out that her long-time boyfriend, architect John Sloan (Reginald Gardiner), does have a house in Connecticut. Though Elizabeth has declined John's marriage proposals for years, desperation gives him a sudden appeal, and John, seizing the moment, arranges for his neighbor, Judge Crothers (Dick Elliott), to perform a wedding just before Jeff Jones and Mr. Yardley arrive. (One of the film's running gags is how many ways a marriage ceremony can be interrupted.) The couple's baby is supplied by Sloan's sour-pussed Irish housekeeper, Norah (Una O'Connor), who provides babysitting services for local mothers working to support the war effort. And Felix joins the party in the guise of Elizabeth's "uncle" to handle the cooking.

How likely is it that all of this will work? Not very, especially when Elizabeth greets Jeff Jones at the door, and something in the handsome sailor's bearing sparks feelings she's never experienced—certainly not from John Sloan, a dull stick who rattles on for hours about the architectural ingenuity with which he's modernized his Connecticut home while preserving its traditional appearance. ("John", says Elizabeth at one point, "when you're kissing me, don't talk about plumbing.") Throw in other complications like a wayward sleigh horse, a baby who miraculously changes hair color as well as gender, a police dragnet, flapjacks that have to be flipped and a cow named Macushla (yes, the same pet name used by Clint Eastwood's Frankie in Million Dollar Baby), and there's barely enough time to say "God bless us every one!"

Christmas in Connecticut Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

With cinematography by the prolific Carl Guthrie (whose credits include the young Ronald Reagan's Bedtime for Bonzo), the black-and-white photography of Christmas in Connecticut has some of the hard edge to it for which Warner Bros. was known in its heyday under studio chief Jack Warner—but only a little. The film is, after all, a romantic comedy, not a gangster picture. Still, Guthrie's lighting, especially as reproduced in the impressive transfer for Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, is sufficiently stark that it's hard not to notice that everything in the film, including the wintry outdoors of Connecticut, has been created on a soundstage. The image has strong, solid blacks, with finely delineated grays and stable whites, all of which creates an effective sense of depth and dimension. Sharpness and detail are very good, except where the source doesn't permit, because areas of the frame intentionally fade into darkness (usually in night scenes). A fine grain pattern is observable throughout, and the grain appears natural and unaffected by inappropriate digital manipulation.

Although Warner Home Video has once again followed its frequent practice of leaving unused space on the disc, it has delivered Christmas in Connecticut at an average bitrate of 20.96 Mbps, which is adequate for a B&W film with pillarbox bars shot at a time when cameras were big and heavy and didn't move like they do today. In any case, artifacts were not in evidence.

Christmas in Connecticut Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The film's original mono soundtrack is encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA 1.0, and it certainly gets the job done without interference from age-related distortion. The sometimes overlapping (and frequently at cross-purposes) dialogue is rendered clearly, as is the musical score by Friedrich Hollaender (The Blue Angel), along with the familiar themes played by the band at the community hall dance (including "Turkey in the Straw" and "Pop Goes the Weasel"), and the theme song "The Wish That I Wish Tonight", which recurs throughout the score and is sung by Dennis Morgan (in character as Jeff Jones) during the course of the film. The dynamic range of the soundtrack is limited by today's standards, but it's broad enough to do justice to the musical performances.

Christmas in Connecticut Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Star in the Night (480i; 1.33:1; 21:27): This 1945 Oscar-winning short was directed by Don Siegel, future director of such classics as the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Dirty Harry. Somewhere in the American Southwest, Nick Catapoli and his wife, Rosa, run the Star Auto Court. A gentle idealist in his youth, Nick has grown hard and cynical with the passing years. But on Christmas Eve, with a new sign, a giant illuminated star, attracting attention for miles around, Nick is about to have a revelation as three cowboys are attracted from a distance and a young couple named José and Maria Santos arrive, just after the last room at the inn has been filled.



• Trailer (480i; 1.33:1; 1:53): This is one of those great, old-style trailers that has footage shot specifically for promotional purposes, with each of the film's stars addressing the camera.

Christmas in Connecticut Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Like most screwball comedy, Christmas in Connecticut relies on improbable (if not impossible) contrivances, but once you accept them, it's an airy confection with pretty wrapping and a lot of tinsel. Much of the credit goes to the chemistry between Stanwyck and Morgan, who are genuinely believable as a couple that might experience love at first sight; to Greenstreet, who had a special gift for being simultaneously menacing and amusing; and to Sakall, who gives all of Fritz's malapropisms an extra zing. The result is summed up by Mr. Yardley in the film's closing line: "What a Christmas! Ho, ho, what a Christmas!" Highly recommended.