IDK abt HOLIDAY (1938)

All my fuss and fury!

I had never seen this! Which is surprising, because I adore a Cary/Katharine team-up—probably because he’s dimpled and dreamy and she’s editorial and weird. I’m not sure, exactly, if I really believe in or care about their chemistry: The Philadelphia Story is one of my favorite films, but its great flaw, probably, is that she ends up with (SPOILER FOR AN 85 YEAR OLD MOVIE) Cary in lieu of Jimmy (or, ahem, in lieu of the city of Philadelphia); and Bringing Up Baby, another one of my faves, feels less like a romance and more like two neurodivergent hobgoblins terrorizing the eastern seaboard. I’m not sure that Holiday really bucks that trend, but nor is it any less delightful and/or watchable. Based on a play by the same writer as The Philadelphia Story (Philip Barry), it covers a lot of the same themes: capitalism, social stratification, hats. In his hunt for “Who I am and what goes on”, Grant, here, is much closer to Jimmy Stewart’s everyman poet than his own prodigal playboy (C. K. Dexter Haaaaaven), though unlike The Philadelphia Story, his flirtation with high society isn’t just a moonlight fluke: he’s welcomed through the doors of the Seton estate, and what’s more, into their inner sanctum (but then again, maybe that’s just what happens when you look like Cary Grant). Katharine is Katharine—exacting, exhausting, rich—though I found her performance to be uncharacteristically, well, human—maybe because Linda’s the most self-conscious of her heiresses, not the marble goddess of The Philadelphia Story or the all-around chaos agent of Bringing Up Baby. Anyway, it’s all great fun, and while certainly not the best (or even the second best) of the Grant/Hepburn pairings, you’re always in good hands with director George Cukor: the halls of the Seton house are twisting, amorphous, a selva oscura that’s long-since trapped Linda’s two siblings, a drunk and a princess, respectively, who might’ve, in lesser hands, been shrugged off as cheap laughs or villains, but are played, here, with a surprising degree of empathy, or in boozy Ned’s case, tragedy (“Where does anyone end up? You die. And that’s okay, too.”). And when I tell you the Earth moves every time Cary does a front flip-flop…

NEXT TIME!