Holiday
by George Cukor
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Actor: Cary Grant, Doris Nolan, Edward Everett Horton, Katharine Hepburn, Lew AyresDirector: George Cukor
Brand: Sony
Cinematographer: Franz Planer
Editor: Al Clark
Editor: Otto Meyer
Producer: Everett Riskin
Writer: Donald Ogden Stewart
Writer: Philip Barry
Writer: Sidney Buchman
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Portuguese (Subtitled); Korean (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Black & White, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 95 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-12-05
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
DVD Reviews of Holiday
DVD Review: Grant, Hepburn, Cukor and fine supporting cast, what more do you want?
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a curiously neglected film that did not even achieve the dignity of a DVD release until the end of 2006. On the other hand, those who remember 1938's "Holiday" tend to like it very strongly, indeed. I recall it clearly as a stalwart of the weekday, after-school movie ghetto on San Francisco Bay Area television during the 1950s. After that, it disappeared, its memory obscured by "Bringing Up Baby" that preceded it and "The Philadelphia Story" that followed it.
This is the first of Hepburn's three films based on works by Broadway playwright Philip Barry. She had understudied the lead back in 1928 and had used a scene from it to audition for the movies. The film met with considerable success, going far toward killing the "box office poison" label that had fallen on Hepburn in the mid-1930s. The next year, Barry wrote "The Philadelphia Story" for her. After a triumph on Broadway, Hepburn (using Howard Hughes' money) bought the play for filming and scored an even greater and permanent triumph with it. In the middle of the Second World War, Barry and Hepburn tried once more with "Without Love," a middling hit on Broadway that in 1945 became one of the lesser outings of the Tracy-Hepburn movie collaboration.
"Holiday" and "The Philadelphia Story" share close thematic ties. Both goggle at the material wealth of the vulgarly rich through the eyes of a common, ordinary Joe (or at least as common and ordinary as Cary Grant and later Jimmy Stewart could get.) Both discover that the splendid outer appearance conceals inner rents and dysfunctions. In both, the ordinary Joe is temporarily tempted but eventually turns his back on mere earthly riches.
Both films share this too: they have long, talky scenes in which the actors actually speak to one another and even respond. The actors not only must deliver that dialogue, they must also understand it while shifting back and forth from light banter, to high comedy, to physical shtick, to personal tragedy. And all this happens not just once but several times in what is effectively a four act structure.
Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn are ... well, Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. What, really, is there more to say? They are both displaying their fully developed comic personas (although Grant had yet to find his characteristically exquisite tailors and seems here to have been dressed by Harold Lloyd's haberdasher.)
This is a film full of notable supporting performances. The always wonderful Edward Everett Horton (1886-1970) turns in an excellent performance as Professor Potter--just as he had done in the first filming of the play, eight years earlier. Horton could always be counted upon to highlight an undistinguished film and ornament a first-rate one.
Grant's character, Johnny, starts off in love with Julia, the younger of the two fabulously wealthy Seton sisters. Julia was played by Doris Nolan (1916-1998). Nolan had started as a model and then established herself as a stage actress. Julia, as played by Nolan, does not generate much heat with Grant and is not a particularly likable character (although someone like the young Lucille Ball might have wrought wonders with her.) She is effectively blown off the screen by Hepburn in the flashier, more sympathetic part of the older sister. Nevertheless, there are a couple of moments in which one can see her--playing with the bigger quality required on the stage--holding her own quite effectively against Hurricane Hepburn. She made a few more undistinguished appearances in films, than returned to success on Broadway. She was married to actor Alexander Knox, with whom she relocated to England when he ran afoul of the Red witch hunts in the 1950s.
The father of the Seton sisters, a man who wishes only to do his best for his family as he sees it, was played by Henry Kolker (1870-1947). (Strangely enough, at one point the 68 year-old actor is required to announce that he is a man of 58 years.) Kolker is a sort of third-tier Hollywood in microcosm. He began directing long-forgotten silent films in 1914. He started acting in them in 1915. He appeared in about 170 films over more than thirty years, playing bit parts and walk-ons, often men of authority, such as lawyers, judges, D.A.s, editors, cops and court noblemen. Virtually all his films are forgettable, with only "Rasputin and the Empress" (as chief of the secret police), "Marie Antoinette," "Too Hot to Handle," "Holiday" and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" being familiar to any but single-minded film buffs. Edward Seton in "Holiday" might have been the biggest role he ever played on the screen--and he's surprisingly good, managing to make a character written as stuffy and wrong-headed into a genuinely admirable individual.
Lew Ayres plays the fourth and youngest Seton family member, Neddy--obviously Edward Seton Jr. He is the weak one who retreated into drink and despair after his father put an end to his career as a musician and forced him--horrors!--into banking. Ayres was still playing youthful parts, variations on the theme he established almost a decade earlier in "All Quiet on the Western Front." A few years later, he would be tempered into a different kind of actor by the heat of the public condemnation he received for his pacifist stance during World War II. (He eventually joined the Army Medical Corps as a non-combatant and earned no less than three battlestars at the repeated risk of his life.) Ayres' Neddy is one of the most likable drunken losers ever to appear on screen.
The excellent British-born performers Binnie Barnes (1903-1998) and Henry Daniell (1894-1963) appear in three scenes that probably involved no more than four or five days of shooting. They play a pair of delightfully sour-tongued and sour-faced New York aristocrats.
The movie was directed by that ultra-smooth master, George Cukor-and it looks like it.
"Holiday" is worth five stars for any movie-goer who believes that the art of the film might extend beyond blowin' stuff up real good.
Description of Holiday
Johnny Case (Cary Grant), a free-thinking financier, has finally found the girl of his dreams ' Julia Seton (Doris Nolan), the spoiled daughter of a socially prominent millionaire ' and she's agreed to marry him! But when Johnny plans a holiday for the two to enjoy life while they are still young, his fiancée has other plans - she wants Johnny to work in her father's bank! As he tries to decide whether to follow his head or his heart, Johnny can rely on at least one Seton in his corner. She's Linda Seton (Katherine Hepburn), the down-to-earth younger sister of his soon-to-be-wife, and she likes Johnny just the way he is.Bestsellers in DVD
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