Twelve films for Christmas, or at least ones I associate with the Holidays, listed between now and through the New Year. I had originally hoped to complete this list for Christmas Day, but a family emergency changed that plan. These are not in any particular order.

Day 4: Christmas in Connecticut (1945 dir. Peter Godfrey)

I recently returned to this film for the first time in several years and I got to watch it with someone who had never seen it or even heard of it. We enjoyed it for what it is. And I keep thinking about this moment, about half-way through, when the story stops for maybe sixty seconds. It just stops, which is noticeable because the rest of the film is a flurry of zany non-stop romantic comedy hijinks. This is a very light-on-its-feet movie which crumbles under the slightest application of logic or genuine communication. You know the kind of movie I mean, where if that character would just say this one thing to that other character then the whole plot wraps up in all of ten minutes. It is the kind of story based on a big lie, a lie that must remain intact or people’s livelihoods are lost.

In this case the big lie is that Elizabeth Lane (Barbara Stanwyck) is not only a kept homemaker living on an idyllic farm in Connecticut with her husband and new baby but also someone who has time to write a very popular monthly article about delicious home cooking and the 1940’s wartime housewife lifestyle. The writing part is true, the rest is entirely fictional. Which, when you think about it, is fictional anyway because, well, it’s a movie. But I’m getting off course already. It doesn’t matter and I’m thinking too much.

What does matter, however, is the con against Alexander Yardley (Sydney Greenstreet, thank you very much), Elizabeth’s boss. If he finds out her entire persona is a fiction then she’ll be fired and won’t be able to afford the mink coat she bought for herself at the start of the movie. Still with me? Good. Because there’s also John Sloan (Reginald Gardner) who wants to marry Elizabeth and means well, but he’s a smarmy, whiny little man…who just happens to own an idyllic farm in Connecticut. What a coincidence. So when Yardley invites himself to Christmas dinner at Elizabeth’s fictional farmhouse, she can use Sloan’s farmhouse to perpetuate the lie in order to save her livelihood.

But in order to use the farmhouse Elizabeth agrees to marry Sloan the Imp. Further complicating matters is the arrival of Naval Officer Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan) whose knowledge of rocking chairs and their various uses borders on criminal stalking. It’s weird and creepy, but somehow endearing to Elizabeth who immediately falls in love with him and he falls for her. Of course.

There’s also the matrimony judge who has to keep escaping the farmhouse, the baby who is one day a girl and then the next day a boy (or maybe it’s the other way around), the morally empowered Irish housekeeper (Una O’Connor, thank you very much again), a cow, and the breath of fresh air that is Felix (S.Z. Sakall) who is a joy in every frame he occupies. Look…it’s all set-up and pay-off. If the set-up fails, the pay-off is a bore; if the pay-off fails the set-up was flawed. This time it all works, not flawlessly but with a little charm and a lot of dedication from the cast it comes together. If you’ve seen Mike Nichols’ The Birdcage (1996), you get the idea.

Oh and that moment when the story stops. The camera just sits in position filming Dennis Morgan playing a piano in the foreground and Barbara Stanwyck walking around in the background. It’s a quiet, contemplative, even melancholic moment and it was really nice. Thankfully it didn’t last must longer or I would’ve started thinking about the plot too much right in the middle of the movie which would’ve been, as Felix says, a “Catastroph!” Not Hunky-Dunky at all.