Christmas in Connecticut is a puzzle I will never solve. It’s apparently very popular with nostalgic audiences. There are at this writing almost 90 viewers’ reviews of it on IMDB, and they are overwhelmingly positive – glowing, even. It was apparently successful when it came out, and it’s treated as if it were a nice example of screwball comedy. And also a “Christmas favorite.” None of that makes sense to me. The film is interesting in its way, but not in those ways. There’s no Christmas sentimentality at all in it; in fact, it feels mainly ironic: a Christmas picture in which Christmas is irrelevant and largely forgotten. It strikes me as an experiment in making a noir screwball. It has an odd affinity with Stanwyck’s great gangster comedy, Ball of Fire (1941). Ball of Fire was experimental on one aesthetic level: Gregg Toland’s deep focus camera created odd spaces and shadows that were more familiar in melodramas and horror films at the time; and even though the film is brilliant in almost every other way, the brooding, looming spaces in the Totten Library are sometimes jarring and incongruous in the midst of all the comic cheerfulness. In Christmas in Connecticut this is exaggerated to a weird degree. It’s as if the director, Peter Godfrey, set out to make a noir film before he had read the script. Cinematographer Carl Guthrie’s later forte was atmospheric seedy early-’50s B-noirs, at which he was very good. In this Christmas noir film the spaces are melodramatically large and deep and full of contrasts. But it’s mainly the story that seems to be a comic inversion of noir roles. The scheming woman — a fraudulent Martha Stewart-like magazine columnist played by Barbara Stanwyck, who has conned her publisher and her readers into believing that she’s married, a mother, and an expert in housekeeping, but in fact is single and childless and lives in a Manhattan apartment and knows nothing about domestic arts, relying on her “Uncle Felix,” played by the great Hungarian supporting actor, S.Z. Szakall — is somehow justified in her scheming. Sydney Greenstreet plays a heavy Condé Nast-type magazine boss, who, unaware that his star columnist in a fraud, devises a plan to have a wounded hero fresh from the war (Dennis Morgan) spend Christmas at Stanwyck’s nonexistent farm home to experience a real family Christmas, all in order to increase circulation. The war hero is almost cynical in his disregard for Stanwyck’s (supposedly) married state. Drawn to each other romantically, cynical hero and fraud broad deceive an otherwise mainly decent and benevolent would-be husband who really does care for Stanwyck (Reginald Gardiner), while they pursue a near-adulterous flirtation. And arguably the Greenstreet has been sorely used himself by Stanwyck’s pretense of being a Martha Stewart. Everybody is in on some scam in the eerie farmhouse, with its Escher-like staircases, except for the would-be husband, who seems to genuinely care for Stanwyck’s character, but who’s treated like a putz by everyone. Sounds like a good noir, doesn’t it? It isn’t funny, its pacing is strange, and its mood is anything but Christmasy. Yet a lot of folks consider it a great Christmas movie. Humbug. (I’m not including any clips, because there weren’t any scenes worth preserving.)
Strangely, given that she gave some of the most iconic comic performances in films like Ball of Fire and The Lady Eve, Stanwyck is no stranger to unfunny comedies. Check out (or rather don’t) Always Goodbye (1938) and You Belong to Me (1941). Both are too dreary to watch.