TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Holiday (Christmas in Connecticut / A Christmas Carol 1938 / The Shop Around the Corner / It Happened on 5th Avenue)
TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Holiday (Christmas in Connecticut / A Christmas Carol 1938 / The Shop Around the Corner / It Happened on 5th Avenue)
- A CHRISTMAS CAROL (1938) Reginald Owen portrays Charles Dickens holiday humbug Ebenezer Scrooge, the miser s miser who has a huge change of heart after spirits whisk him into the past, present and future. From sets to stars to story, this triumphant adaptation adds a glow to the season. Like Tiny Tim s benediction, it blesses us every one.CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT (1945) A magazine columnist totall
A CHRISTMAS CAROL (1938) Reginald Owen portrays Charles Dickens’ holiday humbug Ebenezer Scrooge, the miser’s miser who has a huge change of heart after spirits whisk him into the past, present and future. From sets to stars to story, this triumphant adaptation adds a glow to the season. Like Tiny Tim’s benediction, it blesses us – every one. CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT (1945) A magazine columnist totally devoid of the homemaking skills espoused in her column had better get some fast: her boss has invited himself and a recently returned war hero to her home for Christmas. Laughs, romance, holiday cheer: that’s the recipe Barbara Stanwyck and a stellar company follow in this perennial favorite. IT HAPPENED ON 5TH AVENUE Home for the holidays! GI families hit by the post-World War II housing crunch take over an abandoned New York City mansion. THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER In the third of their four screen pairings, Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart engage in retail romance wrapped in the ribbon of director Ernst Lubitsch’s trademark touch of wit and charm. They play bickering store clerks who are unknowingly secret pen pals. Your patronage will be cheerfully rewarded when you watch this enchanting tale.Christmas in Connecticut
Christmas in Connecticut is a holiday film that plays 365 days of the year. Barbara Stanwyck gives a brilliant, sardonic performance as Elizabeth Lane, a columnist for Smart Housekeeping magazine, whose enticing descriptions of the exquisite meals she prepares for her husband and baby on their bucolic Connecticut farm earns her fame as “America’s Best Cook.” A writer, she is; a cook, she is not. As she types the words, “From my living room window, as I write, the good cedar logs cracking on the fire…” the view is of clothes flapping on the line outside her bachelorette Manhattan apartment. An able supporting cast keeps her lie on life support: her editor, her stuffy and detestable architect suitor, and the wonderful “Uncle” Felix (S.Z. Sakall), an English-garbling Hungarian chef who provides the recipes that fill her column.
Cut to Jefferson Jones, a sailor adrift at sea for weeks after his destroyer is torpedoed. Memories of the food described in Lane’s columns are central to his survival. After his rescue, as he’s recuperating in a naval hospital, a marriage-minded nurse thinks she might nudge Jones to the altar if he could only experience a real domestic Christmas. And it just so happens that she was nurse to the grandchild of Alexander Yardley, the wealthy and powerful publisher of –you guessed it–Smart Housekeeping magazine. And so, she pens the letter that could unravel Lane’s carefully constructed fraud. She writes to Yardley asking that Jones be included in America’s ultimate Christmas–the one to be held at the Lane family farm in Connecticut. The pompous Yardley (ably portrayed by Sidney Greenstreet) believes the Lane myth and instantly sniffs a story that will send his magazine’s circulation skyrocketing. And staring down a lonely holiday, he decides to join the Lanes for Christmas on the farm, too. Now, all Lane has to do is come up with a farm. And a husband. And let’s not forget the baby. Christmas in Connecticut is classic screwball entertainment of the best kind, with its on-target skewering of social convention and house-of- cards-about-to-tumble tension: a perfect farcical vision of domestic blitz. –Susan Benson
A Christmas Carol 1938
This is the desert-island choice of the many versions of A Christmas Carol, with a magnificent, full-bodied portrayal of Ebenezer Scrooge by Alastair Sim that leaves everyone else in the dust. Lean and direct, this film’s version of the story wastes no time trying to impress viewers with the magical nature of the spirits’ visitations. Director Brian Desmond Hurst keeps the focus on Scrooge’s life story, beautifully simplifying and underscoring the theme of lost women with a haunting musical refrain from the folk song “Barbara Allen.” Sim’s commitment to the role is at times astonishing; his Scrooge’s Christmas-morning ecstasy is a marvel of giddy technique. Watch for Patrick Macnee (Steed in The Avengers) as the young Jacob Marley–the actor made his screen debut in this 1951 production. –Tom Keogh
The Shop Around the Corner
One of the most charming and romantic films around, this 1940 comic romance finds James Stewart (Vertigo, It’s A Wonderful Life) working in a small shop in Budapest and longing for a girl to call his own. His coworker, Margaret Sullavan, feels the same, and soon they are both corresponding and falling in love with their respective pen pals. What they don’t realize is that they are writing to and falling in love with each other, but the problem is that they can’t stand each other in person. The beguiling nature of the mistaken identity formula that influenced countless films is done to perfection here, and the wry combativeness and delightful banter between the two leads makes this a very special film. –Robert Lane
It Happened on 5th Avenue
Making his winter home in a vacant New York City mansion,owned by vacationing industrialist Michael O’Connor (Charlie Ruggles), a philosophizing hobo decides to take in a homeless ex-G.I. O’Connor’s unhappy daughter, Trudy (Gale Storm), running away from finishing school, returns home unexpectedly but doesn’t tell anyone who she is or who her dad is when he comes looking for her disguised as a butler. Meanwhile, O’Connor unwittingly competes with the ex-G.I. in a land deal. The film, nominated best original story, contains a worthwhile message of self worth.
List Price: $ 27.98
Price: $ 9.35
More Holiday Products
Yuletime quadruple feature from TCM,
Warner’s TCM GREATEST CLASSIC FILMS COLLECTION is a series of over two dozen twin packs. The four titles in each set are dubbed one per side on two flip discs. Only some movies include bonus features. Transfer quality of these well-preserved ever-popular films is top-notch. All titles in TCM’s “Holiday” set are rated in the 7s and 8s at imdb.
Trivia on movies—
Each version of Dickens’ famous yule story has its fans, and the ’38 A CHRISTMAS CAROL is no exception. This 69 minute Loew’s release features an interesting company behind Reginald Owen as Ebenezer Scrooge. Gene and Kathleen Lockhart are Bob and Mrs. Cratchit and their daughter June plays a Cratchit child. Leo G. Carroll is Marley’s ghost and Ann Rutherford portrays “Christmas Past.” Silent-era clown Billy Bevan, who also lent his raspy basso voice to early Looney Tunes shorts, appears as “Leader of Street Watch.”
In the romantic comedy CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT (1945), Sydney Greenstreet is third billed behind Barbara Stanwyck and Dennis Morgan. Miss Stanwyck’s character was based on Gladys Taber, a ladies magazine columnist who lived on a Connecticut farm. John Dehner cameos as a state trooper. Dehner began as a Disney animator, then appeared often on radio– he was Paladin on HAVE GUN, WILL TRAVEL. Other cast members: Reginald Gardiner, Una O’Conner and Frank Jenks. Also here is “ditzy blonde” specialist Joyce Compton. (To see Miss Compton at her nuttiest, check out Eddie Cline’s 1940 turn-of-the-century farce, THE VILLAIN STILL PURSUED HER, with Alan Mowbray as the baddie and Buster Keaton playing his opposite.)
IT HAPPENED ON FIFTH AVENUE (1947) was the very first ALLIED ARTISTS release. This company was formed when MONOGRAM Pictures and two smaller outfits merged. Frank Capra was slated to direct until producer-director Roy Del Ruth purchased screen rights to this story of a homeless man and his friends who take advantage of a manson left empty while the owners are away for the holidays. The fine cast includes Don DeFore, Ann Harding, Charles Ruggles, Victor Moore, Gale Storm, Grant Mitchell, Edward Brophy and Alan Hale Jr.
Ernst Lubitsch’s holiday romance THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER (1940) was a first screen adaptation of Hungarian playwright Miklós László’s “Perfumerie” (aka “Illatszertár”). This storyline was later used for the 1949 musical, IN THE GOOD OLD SUMMERTIME and in 1998 for YOU’VE GOT MAIL. Director Lubitsch, who also worked in a Budapest shop as a boy, called this his favorite movie. Unlike most productions, all scenes were filmed sequentially. Cast includes Margaret Sullavan, Jimmy Stewart, Frank Morgan, Joseph Schildkraut and in a walk-on, Sarah Edwards.
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Christmas in Connecticut is a great holiday romantic comedy about a young woman who writes for a magazine geared to homemakers. She claims to be married, have a child and live on a farm in Connecticut, but is actually a single, childless, apartment dweller. The problems start when her publisher wants her to give a recent war hero a home for the holidays on her Connecticut farm. She consents to marry a long-time boyfriend who actually has a farm in Connecticut to save her editor from losing his job. They arrange to be married on the farm, but the judge doesn’t get the job done before the war hero arrives. That creates some awkward moments. The housekeeper tends babies for women who are working during the war, and they are supposed to be “the child” but with a different baby showing up each day confusion ensues. Stanwyck’s character, of course, begins to fall for the hero, who is also falling for her but thinks she is a married woman and is trying to respect that. It is all good, clean fun and “What a Christmas!”
The Shop Around the Corner is a very clever comedy whose theme has been repeated in other movies, as mentioned in Annie’s review. Clara is falling for the man with whom she corresponds on purely intellectual subjects. She has never met him. At the same time she gets a job in a leather goods shop and cannot get along with her boss (Jimmy Stewart). You can figure it out from there. Delightful fun. Either one of these two movies is worth the price of this package.
It Happened on 5th Avenue is a pleasant film. The owner of a 5th Avenue mansion is wintering elsewhere and a hobo helps himself to the house. He invites in others who need a place to stay in the housing crunch following WWII. Without their knowledge, one of their fellow tenants is actually the owner, who hides his identity to see what is going on in his home.
Everyone knows the story of A Christmas Carol, so I won’t elaborate on this one. This is a wonderful set of holiday movies at a price that can’t be beat. If you don’t like black and white movies this may not satisfy you, but the stories are great and my family really enjoys them. The only complaint I have is that they are double-sided disks and I prefer single sided.
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