Holiday
Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn costarred in the laugh-out-loud funniest screwball comedy ever made (”Bringing Up Baby”) and the most shimmeringly perfect one, too (”The Philadelphia Story”). In between, they made “Holiday” — released in the summer of 1938 — and showed they could invigorate second-rate material with their considerable dramatic chops. Like “The Philadelphia Story,” “Holiday” was adapted from a Philip Barry play by screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart and director George Cukor. Unlike in “Philadelphia,” none is at the top of his game. “Holiday,” with Grant as a self-made man who begins to doubt his plans to marry into a wealthy family, is thin and hoary. It explores the conflict between progressiveness and old-money stolidity with little of “Philadelphia’s” sophistication or panache.
The movie begins shakily, in fits and starts, but there are some fine moments. The vaudeville-trained Grant does a cartwheel that captures the optimism and exuberance of his character, Johnny Case. Johnny’s fiancee, Julia Seton (Doris Nolan), passive-aggressively invites him to her Fifth Avenue mansion without telling him what sort of family she comes from; called out on it, she acts like “having money” is no big deal. She appears to be a complex character, sweet and innocent but with an underlying deceitfulness. Sadly, the movie conspires to reveal Julia as a narrow-minded shrew, making the contrast with her freethinking sister, Linda (Hepburn), thuddingly evident.
Nevertheless, Grant and Hepburn throw themselves passionately into Johnny and Linda’s dilemma. Always underrated as a dramatic actor, Grant uses swift and subtle changes in his countenance to show Johnny’s growing concern that Julia might crush his spirit. And Hepburn brings limpid vulnerability to Linda, showing the source and the depth of her resentment for her family. Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon as Johnny’s friends, an unpretentious academic and his wife, lend effortless support. And Lew Ayres appears born to play Linda and Julia’s alcoholic brother, Ned. He shows the cowardice beneath Ned’s devil-may-care attitude. Ned’s father has beaten the joy and ambition out of him — he’s a frustrated musician — so he drinks to exert a shred of control over his circumstances. It’s some of the finest work I’ve seen by an actor playing a drunk. As the performances take shape, they give the movie a jolt, and the central sequence, at a New Year’s party where Johnny and Julia’s engagement is announced, unspools with confidence. “Holiday” shines because its cast mines every speck of subtlety from its prosaic trappings.