Christmas in Connecticut (1945)

Directed by Peter Godfrey

You’re Elizabeth Lane (Barbara Stanwyck), the author of a popular housekeeping article in a national magazine, on what it’s like to live on a farm with old-fashioned everything, including a husband and a baby, chickens in the yard, and a great big cow named Macushla. Everything’s going fine, until your boss, Alexander Yardley (Sydney Greenstreet), a man of immense girth and more immense willfulness, stuffy and domineering and impossible to interrupt in his sentences, decides that he’d like to enjoy a traditional Christmas on your farm, along with some fine home cooking — of the recipes you’ve been writing about for so long. Not only that. It’s wartime, and an all-American Navy hero named, of course, Jefferson Jones (played by the winsome tenor, Dennis Morgan), one of the two survivors of a Nazi U-boat attack, hasn’t been able to take decent food for weeks, so where else should he go for his first fine meals since he was picked up from the ocean, but to your farm? What a great oppo…