Twelve Hidden Yuletide Gems
Whether you’re a foodie with a passion for the best dinner dishes Christmas has to offer, or a classic film fan who eats up screwball comedy, this comedy is truly “delicious”.
Before Heloise, before Martha Stewart came along, Barbara Stanwyck bested them all, playing Elizabeth Lane in Christmas in Connecticut (known as Indiscretion in the United Kingdom). Lane is the domestic diva whose purple-prose articles on homemaking and mouth-watering recipes have brought the nation to a standstill.
Little do Lane’s fans know that she’s a career gal typing from a city loft, not a New England farmhouse, and that she can’t cook a lick. This being Hollywood and not a true-life story involving insider trading and time in a women’s prison, she’s able to keep the jig up indefinitely…Especially since her best pal and favorite restauranteur, the loving and pompous Felix (S.Z. Sakall), repeatedly saves her goose from the fire by writing complicated recipes.
But the fun really gets going when the winsome and appropriately-named hero Jefferson Jones arrives for Christmas. Jefferson (played by Dennis Morgan) is an injured sailor who went without food for days after a shipwreck, and falls in love with Elizabeth – or rather, her delicious recipes – while recuperating in a military hospital. He manages to talk his way into a Yuletide dinner for two, but Elizabeth can’t reveal her true self – her boss has a bee in his bonnet about, oh, telling the truth, and has generously invited himself to dinner. If he finds out the dame’s a domestic science dropout, Elizabeth’s job as a food writer is, well, toast.
The real delight in Christmas in Connecticut is how no one – from the screenwriters to the actors themselves – seems to be taking themselves too seriously. Barbara Stanwyck had done comedy before, in Golden Age sex comedies like The Lady Eve and Ball of Fire, but this is her most likable, softest role ever. Meanwhile, Dennis Morgan turns on the reliable Irish charm, Sydney Greenstreet is a blustering blowhard with a heart of gold, and S.Z. Sakall… well, he wasn’t nicknamed “Cuddles” for nuthin’. As frothy as a lemon meringue pie, and with enough warmth in the chill of winter as a batch of fresh Baked Alaska, this cute comedy is sure to please the sweet-toothed.
This decade, the new assault on “bad” foods, and the threat of major lawsuits against McDonald’s hearkens back to another time…one where alcohol, rather than fatty food and sweets, were the enemy. Prohibition. But to hear him tell, one guy who never heard of it was known as….
