My Top 9 Favorite Christmas Movies: Christmas in Connecticut (1945)

This sweet little film is a great departure for two of its main characters. Barbara Stanwyck, fresh out of production from the cinematic masterpiece "Double Indemnity," was cast in the role of Elizabeth Lane based on the columnist Gladys Taber from Family Circle Magazine. Sydney Greenstreet or better known to contemporary viewers as Sam Spade's antagonist in "The Maltese Falcon" also plays against type as Lane's publisher who is out of the loop that what she writes isn't so much a reality as he believes.

Elizabeth Lane is the opposite of what her column entails. Her weekly editorial in "Smart Housekeeping" paints her as a married woman with a child living on a farm complete with livestock and the best cooking that comes from her two hands. In reality, Lane is a single and childless city-dweller who relies on her chef friend Felix Bassenak (S.Z. Sakall) for all of the recipes she documents. When returning war hero Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan) proclaims all he wants for Christmas is a home cooked meal made by the woman herself, Alexander Yardley (Greenstreet) jumps all over this ready to make a journalistic spectacle out of the event. Forced to put this charade into physical form, Lane agrees to marry friend John Sloan (Reginald Gardiner, "The Man Who Came to Dinner") who conveniently also owns a farm in Connecticut. But the one thing Lane has even less control over is her attraction once meeting the war veteran.

According to Robert Osborne on December 24, 2014, "When the film came out in 1945, it was considered [...] nice, certainly, charming, absolutely, and popular. But it wasn't a movie with much of a lifespan." The movie now has a life of its own on TCM alongside "Holiday Affair" and "It Happened on Fifth Avenue."