Welcome to Saturday Night at the Movies.
I'm your host, Glen Holland.
Tonight's film is the 1945 holiday romantic comedy, "Christmas in Connecticut".
Peter Godfrey directed for Warner Brothers from a screenplay by Lionel Houser and Adele Comandini.
The film stars, Barbara Stanwyck, Dennis Morgan, and Sydney Greenstreet, with such familiar faces as Reginald Gardiner, S.Z.
Sakall, Una O'Connor, and Dick Elliot in supporting roles.
The film begins with an American Navy ship torpedoed by a German U-boat.
Two survivors, Quartermaster Jefferson Jones, and his shipmate Sinkewicz, are rescued after 18 hungry days adrift, and end up in a military hospital.
Jones is kept on a strict diet.
His primary source of comfort is reading a food column in each month's issue of Smart Housekeeping Magazine.
In these columns, Elizabeth Lane reflects on her life on a farm in rural Connecticut, where she lives with her husband and baby, and offers housekeeping tips and tantalizing recipes.
One of the nurses at the hospital writes a letter to the publisher of Smart Housekeeping, Alexander Yardley, telling him how much Quartermaster Jones, loves Elizabeth Lane's columns.
Yardley is thrilled by the prospect of increasing his magazine circulation, by bringing a war hero together with his best feature writer for an old fashioned Christmas at her home in Connecticut.
What Yardley doesn't know, is that Elizabeth Lane, is in fact, a single woman, living alone in an apartment in New York City.
Her life on a Connecticut farm is pure fiction.
She gets her recipes, and all her meals from Felix Bassenak, the proprietor of a nearby Hungarian restaurant.
Yardley insists Elizabeth Lane entertain Jones over Christmas, and invites himself to spend the holiday with them as well.
Elizabeth has to find some way to produce a husband, a baby, and a farm in Connecticut within a few days.
With no other alternative, she agrees to marry her perennial suitor, architect, John Sloan, who happens to have a farm in Connecticut, and she enlists Felix to do all the cooking for her during Jones' visit.
But her wedding plans with Sloan are disrupted when Jefferson Jones arrives and Elizabeth finds herself smitten.
She has to struggle to maintain the fantasy she has created at her columns despite slowly falling in love with a man who is himself in love with the fantasy.
"Christmas in Connecticut" is one of the many films that reflected a cultural trend among New Yorkers and other urbanites in the 1930s and '40s.
After the rapid growth of cities in the first quarter of the century and the idealization of sophisticated urban life in movies and literature, city dwellers began to dream of escaping to the country, for at least a few weeks of the year.
Many went to mountain resorts during the summer, but upper middle class families wanted something more, a permanent countryside refuge of their own, away from the urban hustle and bustle, they could still reach if they wanted to, with a short train or trip.
The ideal, was to buy an old farmhouse in Connecticut, or eastern Pennsylvania, fix it up, and enjoy the fresh air and relaxed lifestyle of the countryside.
One of the best known popularizers and chroniclers of this new sort of country life was Gladys Bagg Taber.
She wrote a column, "Diary of Domesticity" for the Lady's Home Journal for 20 years, from 1937 to 1957.
Taber lived at Stillmeadow, a farm in rural Connecticut where she and her husband had substantially renovated a dilapidated 1690 farmhouse.
She wrote about discovering the place, "We came up the steep broken stairs and walked into the main room with a great fireplace right beside us.
The hand-hewn stone smoky with years of fire, the hand-wrought crane rusty with Dutch oven cob webbed.
The great hearth stone had sagged, a rusted iron kettle swung over dead ashes.
'This is it,' I said, 'We'll take it.'"
Taber's columns were chatting and personal, much like the sort of writing, Martha Stewart would make her own, decades later.
She shared recipes and her thoughts on the countryside and it's changing seasons, offering glimpses into her personal life, writing about friends and neighbors, her cats, and the show dog she raised.
And unlike Elizabeth Lane and Smart Housekeeping, Gladys Bagg Taber was the real thing, writing about her own real life.
Perhaps the most Christmasy moment, in "Christmas in Connecticut" shows Elizabeth Lane decorating an elaborate Christmas tree, while Dennis Morgan, as Jefferson Jones sings "The Wish That I Wish Tonight" in that fine tenor of his.
If the tunes seem familiar to you, it may be because Warner Brothers' animation department quickly seized on the song, to use in the musical soundtrack for the studio's Looney Tunes.
Interestingly, the song was used almost exclusively in scenes where Bug's Bunny appears in drag.
Despite being a holiday film, "Christmas in Connecticut" went into general release on August 11th, 1945, four weeks before the unconditional surrender of imperial Japanese forces ended the second World War.
By that time Americans were already sure the war had been won, and the beginnings of post-war euphoria made "Christmas in Connecticut", one of 1945's most successful movies, with a gross of $4 million, or about $64 million today.
At the outset, "Christmas in Connecticut" seems like a war film, with an American ship sailing dark seas, until a prowling U-boat sinks it with torpedoes.
Ticker tape reports the ship loss, and two sailors are adrift in a lifeboat and running short on food.
But Jefferson Jones' dreams of fine dining and the events that lead to him sharing Christmas with Elizabeth Lane are more typical of a home front comedy, when a serviceman uprooted by the war, encounters new people and new situations usually including romance.
Although references to the war continue throughout the film, it recedes into the background, while Alexander Yardley schemes to boost the circulation of Smart Housekeeping, drive the plot.
The character of Elizabeth Lane, reflects the dawn of the postwar era as well.
Initially, she seems typical of the sort of smart, assertive single women who populated the movies in the '30s and early '40s.
She's a variation on the female newspaper reporters in the movies, women who are self-reliant, intelligent, and good at their jobs, jobs that put them on an equal footing with men.
Glenda Farrell played this sort of character, as Torchy Blaine, in nine B movies for Warner Brothers between 1937 and 1939.
As did Rosalind Russell in "His Girl Friday" in 1940.
Jean Arthur played a smart female journalist in Frank Capra's "Mr.
Deeds Goes to Town" in 1936, and so did Barbara Stanwyck herself, in Capra's "Meet John Doe" in 1941.
But in "Christmas in Connecticut", Elizabeth Lane's know-how and competence are pretty much limited to her ability to create a fantasy of family life on a Connecticut farm, while living in the midst of the city, once Elizabeth reluctantly agrees to marry her longtime suitor and to move to his farm in Connecticut.
In other words, once she begins to live out the fantasy life she's created, events begin to spiral rapidly out of her control.
Not only does she fall for Quartermaster Jones in spite of her supposed status as a wife and mother, but she has to keep Alexander Yardley happy, as he imperiously attempts to impose his will on everyone from his hostess, to Felix, to the state police.
Elizabeth survives by falling back on her primary skill, spinning fantasies, but doing so predictably only leads her into more difficulties.
She finds herself confronted with situations she can't handle.
Bathing babies, flipping flapjacks, leading a cow to the barn.
While Jefferson Jones turns out to be someone who can handle all of those situations for her.
Is it any wonder she falls for him?
He even sings.
"Christmas in Connecticut", reflects a specific moment in time, when Americans were anxious to discover some sort of new normal.
After what Felix would call the "katasztrofs" of the Great Depression and the Second World War.
Life on a farm in Connecticut, away from the bustle of the city but close enough to enjoy its benefits like a nice Hungarian restaurant.
There's one version of a new American dream in a world newly freed from war and political oppression.
And it's a dream we believe could work out, even if the two partners involved are an artist and a city bred career woman who, as we're told repeatedly, can't cook.
Please join us again next time for another Saturday Night at the Movies.
I'm Glen Holland.
Goodnight.
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