7.5 | / 10 |
Users | 4.5 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
A journalist, who has never set foot in a kitchen, passes herself off as the consummate housewife and mother in the popular column she writes for a women's magazine. When a promotional stunt plants her publisher and a war veteran at her fictitious home for Christmas dinner, she has to marry her boyfriend, find a house, borrow a baby and prepare a spectacular meal, pronto.
Starring: Barbara Stanwyck, Dennis Morgan, Sydney Greenstreet, Reginald Gardiner, S.Z. SakallRomance | 100% |
Holiday | 99% |
Comedy | Insignificant |
Adventure | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.37:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.37:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio Mono (48kHz, 24-bit)
English SDH, French, Spanish
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 2.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
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.
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.
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.
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.
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