There’s a specific line in the 1968 film "The Swimmer" based off the John Cheever short story that really resonates with actor, writer and film historian Illeana Douglas. It’s when Rose Gregorio’s character Sylvia Finney notes that her upper crust neighbor, Mrs. Merrill, won’t just eat plain mustard.
"Plain mustard ain't good enough for Mrs. Merrill. She had to have Dijon mustard," her character said.
For Douglas, that scene satirized and summarized so much about life in her native state of Connecticut.
"It's just such a great Connecticut line," Douglas told Wisconsin Public Radio’s "BETA."
“I remember being in class-conscious Connecticut growing up, and if you were in someone's house and they had Grey Poupon, it's like you knew what that meant," she said.
"('The Swimmer') is about something that you have to accept in a place like Connecticut. It's about these misplaced values — money, status, living in the right zip code and what happens when you're stripped of all of that and you're shunned," she continued.
Douglas is the famed actor of "Goodfellas," "Ghost World," "Cape Fear" and "Stir of Echoes." She’s also a noted film historian and author.
It was during the doldrums of her COVID-19 isolation in Los Angeles when she revisited "The Swimmer." She was homesick but wasn’t allowed to travel. So she decided to visit emotionally through the film. When she finished, her curiosity was piqued as to what other films were set, filmed or otherwise tethered to Connecticut.
When she began to dig deeper, she found nearly 100 films that present the Constitution State to audiences from the silver screen and decided to flesh out her project into a book, called "Connecticut in the Movies: From Dream Houses to Dark Suburbia."
"I found through the writing of the book that people choose to live in Connecticut for a reason. It doesn't seem accidental that Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward chose to live in Connecticut. You're near New York, but you're not in the city," she said. "It's just a great place to live. There's just a great sense of freedom."
As fate would have it, as she was writing the book, an old fixer upper in her childhood neighborhood came up for sale and Douglas moved back home.
"The final funny part of the story was that my realtor friend sent me a listing for a house that I knew very well, you know, played in when I was a child. And I said, 'Ah it's kind of an intriguing idea. I did say I wanted to fix up an old farmhouse.' And the next thing I knew, I was Mrs. Blandings," Douglas said.
If you don’t get that reference, it’s from the 1948 film, "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House," starring Cary Grant. It’s about a New York couple that heads to Connecticut to construct their titular dream house. It also happens to co-star Douglas' grandfather, the screen legend, Melvyn Douglas.
"I knew him as my grandfather," Douglas said. "He was lovable and I looked up to him very much and wanted to impress him and please him. He was such a movie star, his looks and his charm and everybody loved him. And so, I had that childhood idea of him. But as I write about him as a grown up, and the more I've gotten into movies, that's when I realized what an incredible actor he was, how similar our careers have been in many ways."
While "Mr. Blandings" painted Connecticut in a charming, old Hollywood way, other movies offer a darker version.
Similar to how "The Swimmer" attacked Connecticut’s crusty class structure and the consequences of buying into the American dream, Douglas points toward the 1975 horror film "The Stepford Wives" as a deconstruction of the state’s rosy image.
"The director Bryan Forbes, who is British, and the screenwriter William Goldman, they put sort of a spin on it that I think cast an impression of Connecticut, that Connecticut is Stepford," she said.
"Ever since 'The Stepford Wives,' you have an impression that if a movie is placed in Connecticut, something very bad is going to happen. And that's what 'Stepford Wives' succeeded in doing."
Douglas reexamined the film and stated how the satire Forbes and Goldman thought they were projecting was wildly misinterpreted.
"This was the height of the women's movement. And they had this scene where Katharine Ross is saying to her friend, 'I'm no bra burner,' which was a derisive term," Douglas said. "Again, one of the great screenwriters of our time, William Goldman, somebody who's always sort of lauded, and he's putting these ideas out there and they're just completely sexist."
The book concludes on an essay that combines Douglas’ separate passions. It’s about the 2011 indie Connecticut film "The Green," which she starred in. In a charming essay that includes home photos of her mom’s homecooked craft services meals for her co-stars, Douglas talked about her pride in working on that film.
"It was going to be the first gay film made in Connecticut and I was thrilled to be a part of it. I had always wanted to make a movie in Connecticut and have that experience," she said.
The film, written by Paul Maracarelli (who you may know as the "Can you hear me now?" guy from old cell phone commercials) follows the saga of a teacher Michael, played by Jason Butler Harner, who returns home to teach and is accused of molesting a student.
"He has to defend himself and the town kind of turns against him, which is a theme in a lot of Connecticut films. And by the end, they realize that, he's not guilty and they come back and embrace him. And he has a sort of a sigh of relief," she said.
Douglas applauded Maracarelli’s boldness in telling the story. He’s from New Haven and was unsure how his interpretation would be received by residents filming in Connecticut.
"Doing a film like that where you're saying some negative things about Connecticut, he wasn't sure that they were going to embrace him and they did," Douglas said. "So, yeah, it was a great film to be involved in. And again, one of the great things about the book is that people take a second look at ‘The Green’ and some of these other Connecticut films."
"Connecticut in the Movies: From Dream Houses to Dark Suburbia" is available from Lyons Press.