Christmas in Connecticut (1945)

Ah the Christmas movie!

We all know the ones, where a corporate high-flying career woman reluctantly finds herself in small-town America, covered in snow, to end up in an outlandish meet-cute with a traditional man who teaches her the true meaning of Christmas.

Just so you know, Hallmark has announced a full slate of 42 new Christmas movies this year They have moved from a brand to a genre we can all recognise. The Hallmark Christmas movie may be cheesy, predictable and overly optimistic to the point that we laugh at the clichés. But many of us will still watch them exactly because they are unrealistic and simple, allowing us to have just 90 minutes where our brains don’t have to work.

And besides, how else would we know that there are two kinds of people: those that love Christmas, and those that don’t … yet.

A Hallmark Christmas looks perfect and traditional: a tastefully decorated real tree in a small-town, rural setting and presents accompanied by a child's wide-eyed wonder that Santa has been to visit.

Eric Hobsbawm has argued that many of what we call traditions, were in fact, invented by the middle classes in the 19th Century and given their credibility by projecting their origins into a distant, undocumented past. Dickens may have had more impact on the modern Christmas, than the nativity story.

And Hallmark movies are doing something similar. They are taking a cinematic story-telling tradition and projecting backwards to Hollywood’s golden era as their starting point.

Hollywood is after all, the art of repetition and reinvention.

And could Christmas in Connecticut be the movie that Hallmark are repeating and reinventing.

Well, quite possibly.

So, here’s the plot with some spoilers – but let’s face it you know what to expect.

Barbara Stanwyck is Elizabeth Lane. She is the archetypal career woman. A journalist, food-writer, who has lied about being the perfect housewife in a Connecticut farm house. In reality she is an independent singleton from New York, who not only can’t boil an egg, she doesn’t have any desire to learn. The recipes come from her good friend Felix (a comic turn provided by S Z Sakall). And then she has to try and cover her deception, when her boss Mr Yardley (Sydney Greenstreet) and a handsome war hero Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan), invite themselves to Christmas dinner, expecting the full traditional fare.

Miss Lane has a long-term suitor, the perpetually dull John Sloane (Reginald Gardiner) who just happens to have the perfect farmhouse in Connecticut. To avoid losing her job and the income for her agent she agrees to marry Sloane, whilst stating clearly and insistently that she does not love him.

And then the handsome war hero arrives…

And we watch the meet-cute dissolve the frosty exterior of Elizabeth. Felix does his comic best to ensure the wedding to Sloane does not take place. Much hilarity ensues.

It sounds familiar, yes?

But this is more than a Hallmark movie. Yes, the corporate woman is wooed by the traditional heroic man. However, this is a film about deception and whilst tradition wins out, there is a cynicism that is devoid in Hallmark schmalz. Domesticity is a commodity and Christmas in Connecticut is very open about that.

Let’s start with Elizabeth. Her columns are dedicated to an ideal domesticated setting. But she is a hard-working journalist, showing up in her tailored coat (designed by Edith Head) to assert her own kind of sass and independence.

Yardley, her boss, might be the conservative force, expecting a traditional domesticity – but his motives are capitalism – tradition sells. Don’t let the baby die, he’s good for circulation.

The babies that Elizabeth and John ‘borrow’ are from working women.

Even the idealised Connecticut farm was designed by an architect who can talk at great lengths about how it is only fit for purpose because of modern technology.

Because, although this is a romantic comedy, it was produced in the era of noir. Elizabeth’s seduction of Jefferson is just the light side of femme fatale. It involves deception. There is a disassociation of her feelings for Sloane and Jefferson is disconnected from his feelings for his fiancée – a relationship borne out of economic necessity and food deprivation.

The war and the Great Depression run through this film. Unlike a Hallmark film the trappings of Christmas are costed. You know that feeling when you watch a film and you’re like: how come they can afford that house, and that food, and those presents? Money, in the land of Hallmark, is a dirty word because the girl has to walk away from it for romance to blossom. But not in Christmas in Connecticut – money is motive.

You know Christmas in Connecticut was made in the 1940s. Not just because Elizabeth spends her money on a mink coat without a thought for animal welfare. And not because the soldiers are smoking, in a hospital!

But because under the fluff, the charm and the lack of pretention – it is also just a little bit devious.

And it’s all the better for the lies!

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