Cut to Jefferson Jones, a sailor adrift at sea for weeks afterwards his destroyer is torpedoed. Memories of the food described in Lane's columns are central to his survival. Afterwards 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 this she was nurse to the grandchild of Alexander Yardley, the wealthy and great publisher of --you guessed it--Smart Housekeeping magazine. And so, she pens the letter this could unravel Lane's carefully constructed fraud. She writes to Yardley asking this Jones be integrated 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 this 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 together with a farm. And a husband. And let's not not recall the baby. Christmas in Connecticut is classic screwball entertainment of the excellent kind, together with its on-target skewering of social convention and house-of- cards-concerning-to-tumble tension: a ideal farcical vision of domestic blitz. --Susan Benson