Holiday **** (1938, Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant) – Classic Movie Review 1,259

George Cukor’s 1938 classic romantic comedy film Holiday is the perfect example of the Hollywood screwball comedy of remarriage that its stars Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant specialised in and made their own.

Director George Cukor’s 1938 classic American romantic comedy film Holiday is the delicious, bright, lively and extraordinarily witty second movie version of the famous Philip Barry play, which was written in 1928 and first filmed in 1930 as Holiday.

It is a perfect example of the Hollywood screwball comedy of remarriage that its stars Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant specialised in and made their own.

This time, Katharine Hepburn is given the chance to play on screen the role she had understudied on Broadway back in 1928 as irreverent New York society gal Linda Seton, who sets her sights on poor, rebellious Johnny Case (played by Cary Grant), who is supposed to be marrying her snooty sister Julia (Doris Nolan).

Hepburn was the star Hope Williams’s understudy in the original production of the play on Broadway and played the part only once. She also performed a scene from Holiday for her first screen test, which led to her first film role.

Cukor proves just the right sympathetic director to bring out the best in his ideally paired, perfectly performing two great stars. Holiday is the third of four films starring Grant and Hepburn, the others being Sylvia Scarlett (1935), Bringing Up Baby (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1940).

Hepburn and Grant have got classy support in Lew Ayres as Hepburn’s sympathetic drunken brother Ned, Jean Dixon and Edward Everett Horton as Grant’s hilariously zany friends Nick and Susan Potter, and Binnie Barnes and Henry Daniell as snobby relatives.

It’s an amusing, carefree play, brought to the screen with great craftsmanship by screen-writers Donald Ogden Stewart and Sidney Buchman, as well as the tender, loving care of Cukor. And the exquisite, definitive playing only serves to make the film an even greater pleasure than it could be on stage.

Sadly after all the great work and good reviews, the film was not a financial success, perhaps because Hepburn was considered to be box office poison at the time. Certainly the story about Johnny Case’s plans to give up working did not click with Depression-era audiences struggling to find jobs.

Even so, the film-makers had anticipated this. In the original play, Nick and Susan Potter are wealthy socialites. Because of the Depression, characters and plot were altered so that Johnny, who represented the common man, would have more ordinary friends.

Horton plays the same role in both versions. Charles Trowbridge, Ruth Donnelly and Henry Kolker co-star. The film was intended to reunite The Awful Truth co-stars Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, but Cukor decided to cast Hepburn instead.

Screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart appeared in the original stage version as Professor Nick Potter (the Edward Everett Horton role). Hepburn’s character of Linda Seton is loosely based on socialite Gertrude Sanford Legendre. It was Jean Dixon’s last film, retiring after this performance.

George Cukor (July 7, 1899 – January 24, 1983).

It was an open secret in Hollywood that Cukor was gay though he was discreet about it. By the mid-1930s, Cukor was not only established as a top director but also socially as an unofficial head of Hollywood’s gay sub-culture. His home was the venue for famed soirées, whose guests included close friends like Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Joan Crawford, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Claudette Colbert, Marlene Dietrich, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1,259

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