CIFF Student Classics Film Series: Christmas in Connecticut

All ages are welcome at this screening. 

The Coronado Island Film Festival (CIFF) Student Classic Film Series presents a special “Welcome to the Holiday Season” family movie event, Christmas in Connecticut. The screening will be followed by unveiling the 2025 Student Series, “The War that Made Our World,” slate of Golden Age of Hollywood Classic Films. 

Christmas in Connecticut is an hilarious 1945 Warner Brothers screwball romantic comedy featuring Barbara Stanwyck in one of her most beloved comedic roles, starring opposite Warner Brothers stalwart, Dennis Morgan. 

This Warner Brother’s holiday romantic comedy is a charming, lighthearted Christmas Classic suitable for the whole family.  After its New York premier in 1945, the movie enjoyed an enormously successful nationwide holiday release prior to the first Christmas after the WWII ended. Morgan plays a Navy sailor, rescued, to great fanfare, after being adrift at in a life raft sea and recuperating at a Naval Hospital. The pompous publisher of “Smart Housekeeping” Magazine (played luxuriously by Sydney Greenstreet), sensing a huge Christmas cover story opportunity, invites the sailor to be the Christmas guest of his enormously popular “ideal housewife” feature writer on marriage, family, cooking and food, Elisabeth Lane, and her family, at their picture-perfect Connecticut farmhouse. The problem? While Elisabeth is a crafty researcher and writer, unbeknownst to her publisher, she is also a complete fraud; she has no farm, no husband, no child and can’t so much as boil an egg.  

Stanwyck and Morgan pull of the romance charmingly. But it is perhaps it the supporting cast, drawn from Warner Brother’s magnificent 1940s stock company, that transform a predictable Rom Com storyline formula into comedy gold. Most noteworthy is an absolutely side-splitting performance by Hungarian-American character actor S. Z. “Cuddles” Sakall, who every classic film fan will recognize as the actor who plays Carl the headwaiter in "Rick's Café Américain" in Casablanca.

The 2025 “The War that Made Our World,” Student Classic series will screen and curate two Golden Age film classics each month from February through May 2025. Pre-screening Curation will provide historical background on WWII to properly “set the scene” for each film, offering High School and Middle School Students and homeschoolers a unique cinematic experience to learn about WWII by screening eight of the greatest motion pictures about the war directed by absolute masters of the filmmaker’s craft during Hollywood’s  Golden Age.  

The film will be introduced by Program Director Jon Mosier, who will also lead an after-film discussion. 

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The Coronado Island Film Festival's Student Classic Film Study Program is open to any upper-middle and high school students attending public, charter, or parochial schools, as well as those who are homeschooled. All students are welcome to attend and join the post-screening moderated discussion. 

Two purposes will guide the program: 

1) To develop in young people the discernment necessary to understand dramatic film narratives. Because movies employ so many senses, classic films are among the most powerful genres of visual storytelling. The program will introduce young people to classic movies made by recognized masters of the film medium. 

2) To challenge young people to analyze dramatic film narratives and hone critical-thinking skills. Every dramatic narrative is, in its essence, a story of redemption. Great stories incorporate an introduction, a protagonist, an antagonist, and some form of conflict. Great stories conclude when these conflicts are resolved. This general narrative model is followed, in various forms, in nearly every classic film made during Hollywood’s Golden Age.  

EDUCATIONAL GUIDES/EXPANDED STUDY

A special program will be made available for homeschoolers or independent study students to document program completion as a drama and/or film appreciation elective. 

The discussion guides are drawn from Dr. Onalee McGraw, founder of the Educational Guidance Institute (EGI) and a former educator. She has been featured on Turner Classic Movies, and her classic film study guides have been used successfully with audiences of young people around the nation from widely diverse demographic backgrounds and cultural experiences.  

If you would like more information on bringing a group or class and utilize the guided curriculum please contact Jon Mosier for more information:  Classicstudy@coronadofilm.com .

This launch of the program was made possible with seed funding from a City of Coronado community grant.

About Jon Mosier, Program Director: Jon is a longtime devotee of classic Hollywood films. He developed the Student Classics Film Program as a fellowship Capstone Project in collaboration with Dr. Onalee McGraw at the Educational Guidance Institute. As Jon puts it, “The program is purposefully designed to engage the hearts and minds of young people, enrich their cultural literacy and strengthen their understanding of film as art.“