Holiday (1938) - film review

On his return to New York after a vacation, Johnny Case breaks the news to his dearest friends Nick and Susan Potter that he is about to get married to a girl he met at Lake Placid, Julia Seton.  Johnny knows nothing about his intended’s family and is surprised at what he finds when he drops in on her New York residence.  Julia, he soon discovers, is the daughter of a millionaire banker and lives in one of the city’s larger mansions.   Johnny immediately hits it off with Julia’s unconventional sister, Linda, and her dipsomaniac brother Ned.  Julia’s father is harder to please.  Having been apprised of Johnny’s humble background, Seton Senior believes that Julia is marrying beneath her, but he finally relents and agrees to the marriage.  Then, just when he has won the girl he loves, Johnny drops his bombshell.  He intends to retire on the money he has earned so far and take a long holiday.  Naturally, Seton Senior is opposed to this foolhardy plan, but so, surprisingly, is Julia...

Between Bringing Up Baby (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1940), Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn appeared together in this less well-known comedy, adapted from a popular play by Philip Barry.  Hepburn had in fact understudied the role of Linda (the character she plays in the film) in the Broadway production.  The play had previously been adapted in 1930, directed by Edward H. Griffith and starring Ann Harding, Mary Astor and Robert Ames.  In both versions of the film, Edward Everett Horton played the amiable Nick Potter.

Barry’s play was presumably intended as a send-up of the American dream, specifically that bit of it which made a great virtue of piling up stacks of wealth on Earth.  The theme may still be relevant, but today the anti-capitalist posturing looks about as subtle as a mauve hippopotamus on rollerskates.  The film’s laboured moralising is made bearable by the exquisite chemistry between its two lead actors, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, who rarely performed as well together as they do here.   The part of Linda Seton looks as if it was especially created for Hepburn - no one was better suited to play the part of the feisty, independently minded heroine.  Grant is pretty good too, especially when he starts doing back somersaults.  If he had failed as an actor, he would have made a respectable acrobat.  

Hepburn and Grant may be the main attraction but there is also much fun to be had from the contributions of their supporting artistes. Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon form a superlative double act (which at one point morphs seamlessly into a Punch and Judy act), whilst Henry Daniell and Binnie Barnes make a deliciously evil upper crust couple, comedy villains who look as if they have tumbled from the pages of a novel by Dickens or Trollope.  Lew Ayres - the handsome star of Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) - is reduced to playing a drunken socialite, but does it so brilliantly (and so tragically) that he almost steals the film.   With such a strong cast, directed with aplomb by George Cukor, Holiday is a sparkling social satire that cannot fail to delight.

© Alex Sullivan 2010

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