A cold, snowy holiday week is a great time for binge streaming of television series or to catch up with old movies. For us this week was a stroll down memory lane to the idealized Connecticut as it was portrayed in Hollywood films in the 1940's.
"Christmas in Connecticut" (!945) starring Barbara Stanwyck and Dennis Morgan, with fantastic character actors Sidney Greenstreet and S.Z. Sakall, tells the story of a Manhattan magazine columnist who pretends to be a Connecticut homemaker and gourmet chef but who in reality can't boil water. Her boss (Greenstreet), who is unaware of the deception and eager to sample her homemaking and culinary skills, maneuvers her into inviting a war hero and himself up to Connecticut for a home-cooked Christmas dinner with all the fixings. She tries to pull it off with the help of a chef from her New York neighborhood restaurant Felix (Sakall) and hijincks ensues. Connecticut is portrayed as a snow-covered rural and picturesque place where people drive horse driven sleighs to the local grange hall on the green.
Snowy, rural Connecticut is also idealized in "Holiday Inn" (1942), starring Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire and Marjorie Reynolds, set in a Connecticut country inn that is only open on holidays but still manages to stage full production numbers to a packed house. The Irving Berlin score is the true star of this movie, including "White Christmas", "Easter Parade" and "Happy Holidays". The hit song was so popular they made an unrelated spin-off called "White Christmas"(1954), starring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and Vera Ellen, set in a country inn in Vermont.
My favorite set-in-Connecticut movie of this era is "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House" (1948), starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy, as a young Manhattan couple who buy a dilapidated old farm house, against the advice of their New York lawyer played by Melvyn Douglas. After being advised repeatedly to tear the wreck down they decide to build a new house of the Blandings' dreams. Just about anything that could happen to inexperienced homeowners happens to the Blandings as a succession of contractors work on the project with hilarious results. Living as we do in a town filled with dream houses more people should watch this cautionary tale before embarking on ambitious construction projects.
