Oct 021938
 
five reels

Johnny Case (Cary Grant), a dreamer in the midst of a very promising business deal, becomes engaged to Julia Seton (Doris Nolan), not knowing she’s an heiress with a very proper, old-school father (Henry Kolker).  Neither father nor daughter is aware of Johnny’s unorthodox plan to make a bit of money and then quit for a multi-year Holiday.  His scheme is supported by Julia’s naive sister, Linda (Katharine Hepburn), her drunken brother, Ned (Lew Ayres), and his old friends, the Potters (Edward Everett Horton, Jean Dixon).

The ultimate New Year’s movie, Holiday is a film where starting over is ingrained in every scene.  The only questions are: will the characters take the opportunities presented, and if so, will they choose the right ones?  Well, there is also a question about you, the viewer.  Will you be willing to change your life, or let it slip away?

Holiday has much in common with screwball comedies.  It has the clash of the classes, the quick wit, and the eccentric secondary characters (Henry Daniell and Binnie Barnes are excellent as pompous, haughty cousins who gossip about our heroes and long for “the right type of government”), but not only is it lacking the lunatic behavior of the genre, it is just barely a comedy.  Really, it is a romantic drama with a few well-placed jokes.  The arguments on what is the best way to live, as well as the trials of relationships, are taken quite seriously, and while the film’s positions are obvious from the start, the situations are quite moving.  It is generally a sad movie, with a feeling of pain hanging over most of the scenes.  This is in no way a bad thing.  It is the type of pain that people need to go through in order to figure out what life means.

Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant would collaborate with director George Cukor and screen writer Donald Ogden Stewart on another of Philip Barry’s plays, The Philadelphia Story, two years later, but Holiday is not a dry run for the latter classic.  Nearly it’s equal in quality, Holiday is a forgotten film with its own unique feel.  The acting is particularly strong, which is high praise for a film where script is all-important.

There’s little I can say about Hepburn or Grant that hasn’t been said many times before, and while their characters do not match any others they played, fans will find a great deal that is familiar.  But Lew Ayres, once famous as Doctor Kildare, has not been remembered as vividly, and it is Ayres who puts in the most compelling and heartbreaking performance.  At first, Ned seems to be an unpleasant, spoiled, and stupid child of privilege (a not uncommon character during, and in the years after, the depression), but events quickly prove otherwise.  Only Ned sees everything that is going on around him.  He understands humanity, his family, and the ways of the world, and it is that knowledge that dooms him.  He’s long lost the energy to fight.  It is Linda and Johnny’s innocence that allows them to escape.  They don’t know there is no way out, so they create one.  Ned has only a bottle to give him solace.  Ayres inhabits the role, giving it warmth and tragedy.  This was the performance that should have won the best supporting Oscar for 1938, and the fact that the statue went to Walter Brennan for Kentucky is one of several major indications that the Academy Awards have no relationship with the quality of a film or performance.

I mentioned Holiday as the perfect New Year’s film, but its treatment of Christmas is odd, and I’ve never been able to explain it.  Not a word is mentioned about Christmas.  Don’t think I require every New Year’s film to mention its bigger brother among holidays, but the movie starts on Christmas Day.  That’s soemthing that you have to deduce.  Johnny shows up at the mansion by cab and meets the full, on duty staff.  Everyone in the city appears to be working.  The Seton family then heads to church where the chosen song is “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” and yet, even in church, no one mentions it is Christmas.  I can’t see any larger meaning for this in the story, so it’s just a weird and meaningless piece of trivia.

Holiday is a brilliant film in every way.  It is enjoyable, but will also make you think.  If you’ve never seen it, buy it.  It’s now available as part of The Cary Grant Box Set.

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