Cockeyed perfection: “Holiday” (1938)

By Scott Ross

Johnny Case: I’ve been working since I was 10. I want to find out why I’m working. The answer can’t just be to pay bills and pile up more money. Even if you do, the government’s going to take most of it.
Linda Seton: But what is the answer?
Johnny: I don’t know. That’s what I intend to find out. The world’s changing out there. There are a lot of new, exciting ideas running around. Some may be right and some may be cockeyed but they’re affecting all our lives. I want to know how I stand, where I fit in the picture, what it’s all gonna mean to me. I can’t find that out sitting behind some desk in an office, so as soon as I get enough money together, I’m going to knock off for a while.
Linda: Quit?
Johnny: Quit! I want to save part of my life for myself. There’s a catch to it, though. It’s gotta be part of the young part. You know: Retire young, work old — come back and work when I know what I’m working for.

Years ago I had the misfortune of attending a dispiriting amateur production of Philip Barry’s second most famous play, and it caused me to wonder whether high comedy was something Americans were no longer any good at. An era past can never be reclaimed, of course, nor should it be. But the march of time has not been kind to American humor, which has grown increasingly crude, self-referential, aggressively witless and almost shockingly unfunny. A cursory glance at what passes for political satire now will leave you admiring the cleverness of some of the satirists, but almost never actually laughing, or even breaking a smile. I don’t find myself laughing all that much at The Philadelphia Story or Holiday either, yet if I laugh aloud only occasionally at either I smile throughout both, especially in the screen versions directed by George Cukor and starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.

Both pictures sparkle with wit and abound in pleasure; they radiate good feeling, and admiration for what’s going on in the movies, and for how Barry expressed his ideas, lightly and with gentle humor. But if while enjoying The Philadelphia Story we can never quite forget we’re watching a glossy MGM production, there is something about Holiday, made at Columbia, which in its more unassuming way strikes me as absolutely perfect. I’ll probably outrage someone when I say this, but I’m not sure Cukor made another movie with such suppleness and verve, and Barry’s dialogue is among the most memorable ever committed to film. When I saw several scenes from Holiday excerpted in the PBS series “The Men Who Made the Movies” in the mid-’70s I was well and truly dazzled. I’d never heard people, even people as wonderful as Grant and Hepburn, talking that way, and I wanted more of it.

I say “Barry’s dialogue,” although the picture was adapted, beautifully, by Donald Ogden Stewart and Sidney Buchman; they added their own polished words to Barry’s, and they’re indistinguishable from his unless you know the play well. While there was some tinkering, or re-arrangement, with the original, the big scenes in the movie come directly from Barry’s play and most of the dialogue in them remains intact. All of which would be insignificant if the players (and their director) were not attuned to the rhythms and stresses of the words, and to the thoughts behind them. Holiday is a play of ideas as much as a domestic or situational comedy: Its male lead, Johnny Case, although in love with the daughter of a tycoon, has the radical notion (radical then, less radical perhaps 30 years later when the picture was being rediscovered by young cineastes) of cashing out his earnings while he’s young and taking his time finding out what he wants to do before going back to work; he wants his holiday before he’s too old to enjoy it.

For the actor playing Johnny in the 1938 movie version of the play, the character is closer to Archie Leach, his working-class progenitor, than it is to “Cary Grant,” the character he constructed and successfully hid behind. One of the movie’s funniest moments comes at the beginning when, after coming in through the servants’ entrance of the mansion, Case takes a look at the awesome vestibule and softly intones (as only Grant could), “Ju-das!” I’m not not sure how Columbia slipped that one past the censors, and delight at the filmmakers’ getting away with it is part of the laugh. The other part is Grant’s peerless way with not merely a line but a mere two syllables. Although (unlike his characters in Sylvia Scarlet and, later, None But the Lonely Heart) Johnny Case is no longer working-class, he is not of the upper set either, and doesn’t care either way. He isn’t ashamed of his plebeian background and while he’s witty he doesn’t have the gloss of the Cary Grant prototype perfected in The Awful Truth a year earlier. At the time of Holiday Grant was in the process of becoming the movies’ greatest light comedian; his approach to Barry’s aperçus, and his amusement at the goings-on around him, are charming, but he also understands Johnny’s seriousness of purpose. Grant makes us see how reasonable the switch is when he walks out on his fiancée rather than compromise his ideals, which in lesser hands could seem either inexplicable or petulant.

Even more remarkable is Katharine Hepburn as Linda, the older sister of Johnny’s inamorata. Like her brother Ned (Lew Ayres) who is so unhappy being forced to wear the Wall Street yoke his industrialist father has fitted for him that he’s on his way to becoming a hopeless drunkard, Linda is desperate to flee the family’s grip but, aside from spending time in her childhood playroom or embarking on brief, dilettantish social protests, hasn’t an idea of how to escape. She catches on quickly to how remarkable her sister’s intended is (“Light came into this house this morning!” she enthuses) long before she recognizes how attracted she is to him. Hepburn adored her own patrician parents, so there’s no direct parallel there with Linda. But she grasps the character’s needs instinctively: Linda’s love of childish things like the stuffed giraffe she calls Leopold and the Punch and Judy show put on by Johnny’s friends the Potters (Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon), her longing to create or to otherwise contribute, her desperation at being trapped, and her ready and often self-effacing wit. Like the besotted dialogue between Romeo and Juliet that reveals a love of words and wordplay as much as a strong romantic passion, when Linda and Johnny banter it’s already a kind of platonic love-duet. It just needs a push to become something deeper.

Although Linda Seaton may seem on the surface the kind of Hepburn role (idiosyncratic non-conformist daughter of a wealthy elitist) that turned audiences off her in the late 1930s the character is much more nuanced, and Hepburn plays her with so much feeling that Linda comes off as far more impressive and empathetic than Tracy Lord, her Philadelphia Story role, the one that put her back in the public’s graces in 1940. While Linda’s determination to have things her way borders on serious psychological disturbance, unlike Tracy Lord she isn’t haughty and doesn’t need to be brought down to earth, a process which after the success of The Philadelphia Story became the unfortunate reactionary template for Hepburn’s comedic pairings with Spencer Tracy and which so mars their otherwise effective work together. Everything Hepburn could do well, dramatically and comedically, she puts into Linda. She’s as effective in the climactic revelation scene with her sister Julia (Doris Nolan) as she is putting Johnny on with a somewhat specious interrogation (“somewhat” because there is much truth among the satirical flourishes). There’s a delightful air of childhood playacting here, both in Linda’s character and in Hepburn’s performance, a put-on of the values Linda’s father and sister embrace but which so affront her. Hepburn had a tendency in those years to put people off; she often pushed too hard and occasionally came off as a highfalutin pill — the very sort of character Julie Seaton proves to be. In Holiday she hits every note with exactly the right weight and timbre and when Linda and Johnny perform an impromptu acrobatic stunt, the viewer is cheered; we see immediately, even if no one else in the picture can, what the show’s real love-match is.

Cukor’s direction of his actors is strikingly fresh, and his groupings of them have a feeling of inevitability about them; not only are they not static, you can’t imagine the camera, or the performers, being in a different place. He was always a superb director of actors’ performances, but a picture like Holiday makes you apprehend how good he was at their placement within the camera frame. (Franz Planer provided the beautiful lighting.) Holiday has a spirit, a snap, that is unlike anything else in Cukor’s oeuvre. It’s directed almost like a screwball comedy, which it isn’t, and the pace is wonderfully refreshing. Next to Holiday, even a movie as ginger-sharp as The Philadelphia Story drags a bit.

It’s interesting to compare what Cukor & Co. did in 1938 with the 1930 version, a nice print of which is included in the recent Criterion release of Holiday. It’s a good picture, within the technical limitations of the early talkie, but it never really catches fire. The best things about it are seeing Mary Astor as Julie and Edward Everett Horton as the same character he plays in the 1938 version, but almost entirely different. In the 1930 edition (and the play) the Potters are Linda’s friends; in the Cukor they’re Johnny’s. This makes them outsiders, like Case, observing the monied class from the audience’s point of view. Further, Stewart and Buchman re-wrote almost all of their dialogue, so if you watch both movies back-to-back, the Potters are the most variable aspects. (Jean Dixon as Mrs. Potter in 1938 is also warmer than Hedda Hopper in 1930, but that shouldn’t surprise you.) Astor hadn’t yet mastered the art of talkie acting, and she’s a bit stiff. But she’s so remarkable looking you forgive her, and she’s far more interesting than Doris Nolan in the Cukor.

_{Holiday in 1930: William Holden, Ann Harding, Mary Astor and Monroe Owlsey as the Seatons.}

The Ned Seatons of ’30 and ’38 are comparably good in a general fashion. But while Monroe Owsley’s is a fine stage performance, Lew Ayres’, scaled to the screen, is heartbreaking. You can see in his gentle, caustic manner what a sweet youth is being destroyed on the shoals of his choking familial obligations and his inability to stand up to his domineering father. As Julie, Ann Harding is often effective but she’s wildly theatrical, sawing the air too much, as Hamlet would have said. Her intense, wide-eyed performance makes you truly appreciate Hepburn’s economy of gesture. Henry Daniell and Binnie Barnes as the hated Crams of 1938 also have it over their 1930 counterparts. The different versions of Holiday vary the ending, each successive edition becoming that much more satisfying: In the play, after Johnny leaves to start his holiday, Linda follows a few minutes later; in 1930 she races in a taxi to catch up with him before his ship leaves the pier; and in 1938 she catches him on-board, leading to a rather superfluous happy-fade-out clinch. Robert Ames makes a genial Johnny Case in the 1930 Holiday, but he’s too old for the role. (He’s 41, and looks older.) Worse, there’s no spark in his performance. Johnny should as Linda suggests bring light to the proceedings; Ames’ wattage is, to be charitable, on the anemic side. A side-note, speaking of age: It’s interesting from both a 21st century perspective (and, for me, one slightly beyond the age of 60) to note that as the Seaton patriarch William Holden in 1930 and Henry Kolker in 1938 appear far older than their years. Seaton has a speech in both pictures in which he declares his age as 58, and although the two actors playing him were of similar age, they look a decade older — if not, in Holden’s case, at least two.

_{Linda: Looks like me.}

Two further observations, on surface features:

1.) I don’t know who styled Hepburn’s hair for Holiday, but she looks better here than in nearly any picture I can think of. The cut, close to the head yet full and free-flowing, softens her look and gives her a spontaneous feel. It suits Linda Seaton, but it also suits Hepburn. I wonder why she didn’t stick with it. (Grant’s locks, boyishly falling over his forehead, also fit the young Cary, the way his carefully sculpted cut of the late ’50s and beyond suited the older one.)

2.) In the Criterion Holiday, when Hepburn and Grant do their acrobatic stunt in the playroom, the ceiling looks like badly-stretched muslin. Columbia may have been cheap, but if you look at the photo of the moment a few paragraphs above you can see a pattern on the ceiling that is invisible in the digital “restoration.” This is nearly as bad as the way every digital edition of Citizen Kane reveals the actors’ faces in the projection-room scene, destroying Orson Welles’ careful contrivance of not alerting his audience to the presence of Everett Sloan, Erskine Sanford, Joseph Cotten and himself.

Why is it so hard for today’s technicians to honor the work of the great studio craftsmen? They knew what they were doing — what are you up to?

Text copyright 2022 by Scott Ross