Lights, camera, Connecticut!
Book tells the story of the Nutmeg State in the movies
In the 1935 film “The Wedding Night,” Gary Cooper plays a New York writer who finally finishes his novel after a salutary change of scenery. “I’ve been running all over looking for life, and I’ve found it right here,” he tells his love interest.
“Here” is a farm in the country, but more important, it’s Connecticut. The film, part of a genre called country-living comedies, wasn’t the first to feature our state, but it was among the first to give it a silver-screen identity.
Over more than a century, Connecticut has been the setting for many movies, but it’s also been a shape-shifting character with a surprising history. A new book offers a tour of the state’s film career that ranges from sex romps to horror to homeowner misadventures.
“Connecticut in the Movies: From Dream Houses to Dark Suburbia” would have filled a gap in local literature had it done no more than chronicle the 90-plus movies with links to the state. But it might not have been so much fun in the hands of a different author.
Illeana Douglas, an actress and writer, brings considerable insight to the movies and their messages. She’s also a Nutmeg State native who’s as excited as anyone to see Connecticut on the big screen. She keeps herself in the story as a witty tour guide.
One minute she’s considering whether “The Stepford Wives” is a dark commentary on the women’s movement or an insensitive parody of it. The next, in a photo caption, a less-profound thought reveals her as one of us: “Hey, is that a Connecticut license plate?”
Douglas organizes her film journey thematically (“Crimes
and Misdemeanors,” “Connecticut Cameos,” etc.), but much of the book goes beyond categories to make an argument that the state has had its own personality on-screen. Actually, multiple personalities.
It started in the ’30s with those country-living comedies. In “The Wedding Night,” “Theodora Goes Wild” (1936) and “Bringing up Baby” (1938), Connecticut is more than a backdrop. It has a recurring role as a restful place where people rediscover all that’s wholesome and meaningful, an antidote to the Manhattan rat race.
None of those movies were filmed here, so the state’s restorative ruralness was a Hollywood concept. But it had roots in reality, as show business people working on Broadway discovered the state in the 1920s and ’30s, Douglas writes. Some moved here, but one star, Katharine Hepburn, personified the state more than anyone, having grown up in Hartford and summered in Old Saybrook.
“She could be called an ambassador of the Connecticut brand,” Douglas writes.
If Connecticut is a place to get back in touch with what matters, then it’s also perfect for spending Christmas, as we know today from a parade of locally shot Hallmark movies. But two World War II-era classics used that idea first. “Christmas in Connecticut” (1945) finds Barbara Stanwyck as a magazine columnist whose artificial persona is made real when she celebrates at an idyllic farm Douglas calls “Currier and Ives on steroids.”
Then there’s “Holiday Inn” (1942), in which Bing Crosby retires to Connecticut and turns his farmhouse into a nightclub that’s open only on holidays. This is the movie that gave us “White Christmas,” with its longing for a better time.
With postwar development, the rural ideal became suburban, which exacted a cost, as Cary Grant found in “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” (1948). Playing a New York ad man who moves out of the city, he gets fleeced by charming locals and finds his dream house is a money pit. The film co-stars the author’s grandfather, Melvyn Douglas, who figures in a few Connecticut movies.
In one of many delightful details Douglas unearths, she tells us that as a promotion, 73 replica Blandings houses were sold as kits, and four survive in Wethersfield, Hartford, Trumbull and Bridgeport.
Connecticut’s on-screen identity changed as American society became more complex. The suburbia of Mr. Blandings was of the earlier world, but by the ’50s and ’60s it had become a place where forbidden desire lurked beneath the surface. A string of sex comedies starring Paul Newman, Richard Widmark, Janet Leigh, Shelley Winters and others reflected a spicier Connecticut that wasn’t G-rated.
But it wasn’t all fun and games. Suburbia bred frustrations that went beyond the perils of building a house, and Connecticut hosted stories that reflected the down side of marriage, unfulfilled dreams and life gone awry.
Examples include Gregory Peck’s hollow existence as an executive commuting to New York in “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” (1956), and infidelity rocking the marriage of George Segal and Eva Marie Saint in “Loving” (1970).
Two of the bleakest entries are “The Stepford Wives” (1975), in which men replace their wives with robots that better suit their fantasies, and “The Swimmer” (1968), where Burt Lancaster makes his way home through his Fairfield County neighbors’ pools.
When he gets there, the unraveling of his life is revealed. A photo from this curious film is on the book’s cover, evoking the “dark suburbia” of its subtitle.
Interpreting these movies to trace the changing portrayal of Connecticut is the book’s marquee achievement, but there’s more ground to cover.
Our neck of the woods was too remote to figure in the escape-Manhattan theme, but we’re well represented elsewhere, from William Gillette’s “Sherlock Holmes” to Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” The local angle is especially rich in a chapter titled “Location, Location, Location: The Town is the Star.”
In “It Happened to Jane” (1959), Chester stands in for Maine, where Doris Day runs a lobster business and lands Jack Lemmon. Residents are in every scene, and a co-star, Max Showalter, loved the place so much he moved there.
“Parrish” (1961), starring Troy Donahue, Claudette Colbert and Karl Malden, takes the prize for most local ties. Shooting locations included Old Saybrook, Essex and Groton. Both the Naval Submarine Base and the Chester-Hadlyme ferry are featured. The film was adapted from a book by New London native Mildred Savage, and Delmer Daves wrote the screenplay at the Bee and Thistle Inn in Old Lyme. Who knew?
The movie with the ultimate starring role for a town had to be “Mystic Pizza” (1988), and Douglas proclaims it “without a doubt the best-known film associated with Connecticut — I mean, it has Mystic right there in the title.”
The coming-of-age story that made stars of both Julia Roberts and a local eatery is still familiar, but did you know it all started with another Mystic restaurant? Douglas recounts how Amy Holden Jones was looking for fried clams while traveling and found them at Sea Swirl. Strolling through town afterward, she spotted Mystic Pizza’s sign and thought, “That would be a great title. What’s the movie?” She answered the question by writing the screenplay.
Douglas makes time for back stories like this as well as fun facts. “Parrish” is set on the state’s tobacco farms, and we learn that a young Martin Luther King worked on one of them. The Waterbury setting of “Stanley & Iris” (1990) is reason enough to note that the city’s brass factories produced uniform buttons for “Gone With the Wind.” And the bell that heralded angel wings in “It’s a Wonderful Life” was made in East Hampton.
A handful of films highlight Connecticut history. In addition to Steven Spielberg’s “Amistad” (1997), there are retellings of less well-known episodes like “Marshall” (2017), in which Chadwick Boseman portrays future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall arguing a Connecticut case early in his career.
Maybe the most interesting slice of history is “Boomerang!” (1947), director Elia Kazan’s look at an obscure but fascinating 1924 murder trial in Bridgeport. Dana Andrews plays a state’s attorney who questions the guilt of the man he’s prosecuting.
Some Connecticut films, “Boomerang!” among them, make for happy discoveries while others are established classics. But their number and variety are a revelation. Douglas has done her fellow Nutmeggers a service by bringing them together for movie fans to appreciate.