George Cukor (1938)
Johnny Case, by dint of brains and hard work, has risen from humble origins to become a successful corporate lawyer on Wall Street. A whirlwind romance with Julia Seton, the daughter of an enormously wealthy banking family, promises to make him even more financially comfortable. There’s a hitch, though: rather than making more money, Johnny wants to take time out – a holiday – to reflect on the meaning of life. George Cukor’s comedy is based on a play by Philip Barry. The original production of Holiday opened on Broadway in November 1928 and ran until June of the following year. It was, in other words, written and first produced at a time when the American stock market was continuing to climb ever higher.
The first film adaptation of Barry’s play, directed by Edward H Griffith, was released in 1930, after the Wall Street Crash but before the Great Depression had really begun to bite. Holiday’s initial success in the theatre and on screen was enough to trigger the Columbia remake, with George Cukor at the helm and a cast headed by Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. In 1938, America was through the worst of the Depression but the economy was still very shaky. The idea of a Wall Street banker affluent enough to stop working for as long as he needed was, by now, distinctly lacking in popular appeal. The Cukor Holiday, although well received by critics, failed commercially. There may have been a second important factor that kept audiences away: this version arrived in cinemas in the same year that Katharine Hepburn was labelled ‘box-office poison’.
It isn’t hard to see why Hepburn’s screen presence was turning people off. As Linda Seton, the willful, volatile elder sister of conventional Julia, she’s technically impeccable. She can change the emotional temperature of a scene apparently at will. No actress has ever sped down a long, winding Hollywood staircase with her athletic elan (there’s more than one opportunity to do this in the Seton family’s vast Park Avenue mansion). But Hepburn’s idiosyncratic tone and phrasing get to be grating when she has many lines to speak as she does here. More crucially, she’s such a commanding performer that she always seems in charge. When she realises she’s falling love with her prospective brother-in-law, the fast-talking, competitively witty Linda is suddenly vulnerable. Katharine Hepburn carries this off so powerfully that the display of vulnerability comes across as a form of self-assertion.
Cukor, Hepburn, Grant and Donald Ogden Stewart, who wrote the screenplay with Sidney Buchman, would team up successfully two years later on The Philadelphia Story – Philip Barry’s best-known play and, unless Stewart and Buchman’s adaptation did Barry a serious disservice, a much more satisfying piece than Holiday. The personnel of The Philadelphia Story includes, as well as the super-rich characters, the journalist and photographer assigned to cover the high society wedding. Professor Nick Potter (Edward Everett Horton) and his wife Susan (Jean Dixon), Johnny’s droll, benevolent friends, are a kind of leavening agent in Holiday but have much less screen time than their counterparts in the later work. While extraordinary privilege dominates in Holiday, it’s also an Aunt Sally. From the outset, the Setons’ absurd wealth is lampooned. Linda, the only one of his three children who takes on the paterfamilias Edward (Henry Kolker), repeatedly comes out on top in their verbal exchanges. The extent to which plutocracy has damaged Edward’s son – the alcoholic, ineffectual Ned (Lew Ayres), who could have been a composer but was pushed into banking – gives the material a bitter note that isn’t dispelled by the eventual triumph of love (between Linda and Johnny) over money.
Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story has, in effect, three men to choose from: her plodding nouveau riche fiancé George Kittredge; politically serious but romantically naïve Mac Connor; and C K Dexter Haven, the infuriating, charismatic playboy whom Tracy’s already divorced. The romantic options for Johnny Case in Holiday aren’t just more limited and less entertaining. His engagement to Julia doesn’t make sense – even comic sense, as a preposterous mismatch (as Tracy’s engagement to George is). At the start of the film, he tells the Potters he knows nothing about her circumstances. When he first visits the Setons’ home, he goes to the tradesman’s entrance rather than the front door. Johnny’s marathon journey from the servants’ quarters to the room where he eventually meets Julia is amusing but he doesn’t react much to the discovery that the girl he means to marry is a member of one of New York’s wealthiest families – which isn’t sufficiently explained by his suspicion that there may be more to life than material wealth. You never believe that Johnny could be infatuated with Doris Nolan’s Julia – or in the supposedly strong sisterly bond between her and Linda that subsequent events somehow destroy. The script deliberately keeps Julia’s mercenary true colours under wraps until it’s good and ready for them to emerge.
Katharine Hepburn’s performance – accomplished but not enjoyable – epitomises Holiday, though there are compensations. Dismaying as Ned Seton is, Lew Ayres plays him gracefully. Whereas the plot diminishes Julia too abruptly, Doris Nolan’s face, with the help of Franz Planer’s camera angles and lighting, hardens more gradually and persuasively. It works for the character of self-made Johnny Case that Cary Grant, at this stage of his Hollywood career, still had a few rough edges. Early on, Johnny does a cartwheel, then a somersault, explaining that, whenever he feels things are getting on top of him, this is how he cheers himself up. Except for a few seconds’ acrobatics with Linda, Johnny – or, at least, George Cukor – then appears to forget about this remedy until the happy final scene of the film. It’s a pity because Cary Grant’s gymnastic outbursts, along with Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon’s lovely double act, are the only things in Holiday that give real pleasure.
12 August 2019
