Quite often the Christmas season at the cinema is plagued by a series of superficially and sugary useless stories, though in the last few months we have seen the successful rise of the film set in a dystopic future, so expect your holidays to be spiked also by a healthy dose of dystopia.
There is a way to escape being trapped in such stories, though, and that's by taking refuge in old black and white festive films such as Christmas in Connecticut (1945) directed by Peter Godfrey.
This light and romantic comedy of errors revolves around Elizabeth Lane (Barbara Stanwyck), a famous and loved food writer contributing to a popular magazine with extensive features about her life in a farm in Connecticut, with her husband and young child.
Elizabeth can write, but she's actually single, lives in New York and, above all, she can't cook. It's indeed her friend and restaurateur Felix Bassenak (S.Z. Sakall, more famous for starring as the waiter in Casablanca), a sort of fatherly figure, who constantly provides her with recipes for her articles.
Things get complicated and her lies risk to make Elizabeth and her editor lose their jobs at Smart Housekeeping when their publisher Alexander Yardley (Sydney Greenstreet) asks her to host a Christmas dinner for a returning war hero, Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan).
Yardley hopes that by spending Christmas at her farm the sailor will finally get the chance to sample the welcoming warmth of a real American home, while boosting the sales of his magazine.
Desperate and at the prospect of losing everything she has so far gained, Elizabeth accepts a wedding proposal by selfish friend and architect John Sloan (Reginald Gardiner) who actually owns a farm in Connecticut, planning to turn her life from fictitious into real in just a few hours. Luckily for her, things don't go as planned and true love (and well-cooked food…) eventually triumph.
There are some interesting fashion connections in the film, first and foremost the costumes were designed by Edith Head and Milo Anderson.
Borrowed from Paramount, Head dressed Stanwyck, while the other costumes were by Anderson, chief designer at Warner Brothers for 24 years between the early ‘30s and the ‘50s.
One of the key garments in Elizabeth's wardrobe is her newly acquired mink coat that appears almost at the beginning of the film.
Felix is curious about it, but Elizabeth reassures him she will be paying for it with her own salary for the next six months, highlighting how she had promised herself a mink coat and she needed it to boost her morale. Felix, ever the fatherly figure or protective uncle trying to reason with Elizabeth, replies: "Nobody needs a mink coat but a mink!".
The mink coat is characterised by a terrifically exaggerated shoulder silhouette (think Mildred Pierce's wardrobe that marked the protagonist's rise from a working class milieu to the upper class status and towards independence and you get an idea…) that quite often seems to occupy the entire frame.
The mink is accompanied by a wardrobe that comprises skirt suits (the one with a chain trompe l'oeil motif around the neck is actually quite modern and desirable), long gowns matched with a white bolero with furry details or with a jacket accessorised with a velvet bow (some of the costumes such as the skirt suit with an embroidered motif that Elizabeth wears when she first meets Jones are reminiscent of Schiaparelli's designs).
It may be full of stereotypes (Elizabeth's successful career but her complete lack of culinary skills hint at the fact that independent women can't cook…), but Christmas in Connecticut is still a funny movie with some stylish fashion moments to rewatch and get inspired by.
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