Holiday (1938) Review

Title: Holiday
Year: 1938
Director: George Cukor
Country: US
Language: English 

I love George Cukor (The Philadelphia Story) I love Cary Grant (The Awful Truth), I love Katherine Hepburn (Bringing up Baby) and, surprsing to no-one, I love when all three collaborate together. Grant & Hepburn have an undeniable chemstry that seaps through the big screen; reminding us of our free & bumbling selves. Cukor knows the right way to harvest this chemistry & get the most out of our charming actors. 

Part of a string of critically acclaimed pictures that turned out to be bombs at the box office, which would relegate Hepburn to "Hollywood Poison" until the 40's, Holiday is, on the surfacem, a heartwarming picture about balancing freedom with obligation and, within deeper context, a critique of older generation mentality. 

In this picture free-thinking Johnny Case (Cary Grant) finds himself betrothed to a millionaire's daughter. When her family, with the exception of black-sheep Linda (Katherine Hepburn) and drunken Ned, want Johnny to settle down to big business, he rebels, wishing instead to spend the early years of his life on "holiday."

While Holiday (1938) is a fairly funny picture, one must not be blind to the subtext in the screenplay, which mirrored the real world at the time. Johnny represents a fairly new post-depression pre-wwII economic attitude that felt old wealth brought about the economic collapse of 1929. New Dealers, who sought to spread wealth amongst social classes, were at odds with the old ways of hoarding wealth. There's even a line within the film, where the millionaire father states that things would be better "if only we had a different form of government."

Overshadowed by more famous pictures of the era, like Philadelphia Story and Bringing Up Baby, Holiday is a remarkable feast to swoon at. We rarely see actors with this much charm, wit, and grace, bouncing off one another.