Connecticut in the Movies: From Dream Houses to Dark Suburbia
By Illeana Douglas
(Lyons Press, 352 pages, $40)
Hollywood has had a longstanding fascination with Connecticut, as evidenced by the more than 200 films set in that state. In her new book Connecticut in the Movies: From Dream Houses to Dark Suburbia, actress, film historian, and long-term Connecticut resident Illeana Douglas traces the history of those films, demonstrating how the depiction of the Constitution State on the silver screen has changed dramatically over the last century from that of a peaceful rustic refuge from New York City and the symbol of upward mobility to a suburban prison punctuated by conspicuous consumption, social conformity, and a proverbial winter of discontent.
Douglas, a granddaughter of actor Melvyn Douglas who was nominated for the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the 1995 film To Die For, has thoroughly researched her subject matter. Connecticut in the Movies covers everything from silent films — like D.W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920) — to true-crime-inspired productions — such as Everybody Wins (1990), starring Nick Nolte and Debra Winger with a screenplay by playwright Arthur Miller, loosely based on the story of New Canaan teenager Peter Reilly, who was accused of murdering his mother.
The production of Way Down East is a compelling illustration of the inherent riskiness of the early film-making days when there were no stunt doubles. While on location in Farmington, the film’s star, Lillian Gish, suggested that her long hair and her right hand both trail in the water as she drifted on an ice floe toward the falls, creating a vivid image that was later used in the film’s promotional materials. The legendary actress’s hand and hair froze while she was shooting the scene, and pieces of her hair broke off. She would experience problems with her right hand for the rest of her life. When Gish was interviewed years later about the small fee she received when she put her life in jeopardy, she responded, “We didn’t do it for money; we did it for love.”
Connecticut has also served as the setting for many a holiday film, including Christmas in Connecticut (1945), which stars Barbara Stanwyck as Elizabeth Lane, a single New York City magazine columnist who has created a fictional persona of a dedicated wife, mother, and gourmet cook with a country home in Connecticut. Elizabeth has been passing off as her own the recipes of her friend Felix Bassenak (Sydney Greenstreet), a New York City chef. When returning war hero Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan) asks to experience a home-cooked Christmas meal in Connecticut with the celebrated columnist and her “family,” Elizabeth, who knows she will be fired if her publisher and the public at large learn of her deception, quickly devises a scheme that involves borrowing a Connecticut home and a neighbor’s baby. The film was memorable not only for its salute to patriotism but also for its not-so-subtle message that now that the war was over, women should leave the workforce and focus on being wives and mothers. While Christmas in Connecticut reinforces the social mores of the late 1940s, its charm transcends its time stamp. If Elizabeth was a contemporary columnist, we would call her a social influencer. It is no surprise the film remains a holiday staple.
The book’s subtitle, “From Dream Houses to Dark Suburbia,” was inspired by the juxtaposition of two landmark Connecticut lifestyle films, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948) and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956). The former, based on Eric Hodgins’ novel of the same name, tells the story of Jim Blandings (Cary Grant), an advertising executive, and his wife Muriel (Myrna Loy) who are motivated by a magazine advertisement promoting “Peaceful Connecticut” to vacate their tiny New York City apartment for Lansdale, Connecticut, a fictional town inspired by New Milford, a community conveniently located within commuting distance of New York City, where “the right people live.”
The plot involves the Blandings’ being “swindled” by an unscrupulous realtor. Consequently, instead of renovating an existing farmhouse, they end up building an expensive new home. Hodgins, a vice president for Time Inc. in New York in the late 1940s, based his book on his personal experience renovating an old colonial house with 30 acres of land with his wife. The film adaptation boosted Connecticut as a desired luxury family community, and it also made history as one of the first films to have extensive product placement and merchandising tie-ins, with brands such as General Electric, Kellogg’s, and Ford featured prominently. (READ MORE: The Anti-Woke Reading List)
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), based on Norwalk resident Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel, can be seen as the cynical companion to Hodgins’ Mr. Blandings. Although Wilson and Hodgins shared not only their home state but their place of work, Hodgins tells a humorous story of a search for a better life, while Wilson exposes the dark underbelly of the suburban existence. In The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Tom Rath (Gregory Peck), his wife Betsy (Jennifer Jones), and their three children don’t see a happily ever after in their future; for the Raths, the Connecticut lifestyle is a burden, their house “a graveyard.”
When Tom’s grandmother dies and leaves him her estate in South Bay, Tom and Betsy sell their home and move. The estate’s higher monthly expenses necessitate that Tom accept a higher-paying public relations job at the United Broadcasting Corporation. His first assignment is to write a speech about the nation’s growing mental health problem for the company’s president, Ralph Hopkins (Fredric March), to deliver at a conference. This project evolves into a nightmare in which Tom is forced to rewrite the speech daily. He is also suffering from what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder and harboring guilt about a secret affair that he had during the war with an Italian woman named Maria, with whom he has an illegitimate son. While Jim Blandings enjoys creating advertising campaigns and slogans, Tom is frustrated by United Broadcasting’s office politics and its pressure-cooker environment. When he questions whether professional success is worth the personal sacrifice, Hopkins scolds him: “Big successful businesses are not built by men like you, nine-to-five and home and family.” Those same questions still resonate today, with the only difference that women now also commute to full-time jobs and navigate the same career-family dilemmas as men.
When Ira Levin’s book The Stepford Wives (1972) was released, he claimed it was a satire of “robotic conformity in suburban Connecticut.” His intention was eclipsed by the public response to the 1975 film, which depicts the fictional Stepford community in which men secretly kill their wives and replace them with identical robots dressed in antebellum clothing. Many women saw the film as an overt rejection of the women’s movement, as it stoked one of their greatest fears: “Did men really want women to be equal partners in work and marriage? Or, given the option, would they prefer a malleable female programmed to care only about shopping, housework, and sex?” The fact that the women in Stepford have been forced to abandon their careers and the big city for life as perfectly coiffed and manicured homemakers not only undercuts the women’s movement but also makes a broader statement about the urban-to-suburban exodus: The suburbs, particularly the affluent ones in Connecticut, are the land where women sacrifice their independence and give up their dreams.
Disinterest and self-involvement can also be a catalyst for tragedy, Douglas shows, and such is the case in The Ice Storm (1997), which is based on Rick Moody’s 1994 novel of the same name. Set in 1973 in New Canaan, it tells the story of two affluent couples — Ben and Elena Hood (Kevin Kline and Joan Allen) and Jim and Janey Carver (Jamey Sheridan and Sigourney Weaver) — with intertwined lives: Ben and Janey are having an affair of which their respective spouses are feigning ignorance. The movie’s central activity takes place on Thanksgiving weekend on a night when an ice storm has infiltrated New Canaan. The Hoods and Carvers are attending a “key party,” one of the potent symbols of the “liberated” 1970s, while their children are engaged in their own sexual experimentation games. While no one is paying attention, the Carver’s younger son Mikey (Elijiah Wood) wanders into the storm, and tragedy ensues.
I have written about this film before for these pages, and every time I revisit its horrible denouement, I am reminded of how easy it is to get so wrapped up in our personal dramas that we forget what’s most important. This theme is replicated in another Westport-based film, The Land of Steady Habits (2018), in which Anders Harris (Ben Mendelsohn) retires early from a finance career and divorces his wife Helene (Edie Falco). These recent decisions leave him at an emotional crossroads, and he starts exhibiting adolescent behavior, such as taking up with a stripper (Connie Britton) and getting high on a regular basis with Charlie Ashford (Charlie Tahan), the teenage son of his neighbors Mitchell and Sophie Ashford (Michael Gaston and Elizabeth Marvel). Charlie ends up ingesting PCP-laced pot and dying from an accidental overdose. His death serves as a wake-up call to Anders and the Ashfords to reevaluate their priorities.
Illeana Douglas is to be commended for vividly chronicling her state’s changing face on the silver screen. And while she certainly makes her argument for the dark vision of film, Connecticut in the Movies also includes plenty of upbeat movies, such as the 1988 coming of age film Mystic Pizza featuring a young Julia Roberts. I walked away with a new understanding of films that I had previously seen along with a desire to watch the ones new to me, and I highly recommend this thoughtful provocative examination to all.
