Product: Holiday (1938)
Rating: 5.0
"Just One Day Out Of Life"
I never really liked this movie much until my wife and I invested in one of those newfangled "Hepburninators" on TiVO, which allow you to watch a full-length Katharine Hepburn movie in half the time by eliminating all scenes in which she appears. Now, as I watch HOLIDAY in relative comfort, freed from the worry that at any moment she may show up and spoil all the fun, I can relax, for like the old saying goes an hour without Katharine Hepburn like a month in the country. My posture improves, there's a bloom of youth n my cheeks, I've got that old joie de vivre again. There's a swing in my step even the neighbors have noticed and commented on. I think this Hepburninator is the greatest thing since sliced bread and It'll make 'em a mint.In the meantime it's funny watching a HOLIDAY in which Julia Seton, not Linda Seton, is the heroine. For one thing, since Julia never liked the childhood playroom in which most of the movie takes place, we don't spend much time there. Linda and her brother, the bibulous "Neddy," played so beautifully by Lew Ayres, went there all the time whenever it got tough being the richest people in America. Julia prefers to stay downstairs. Doris Nolan isn't much of an actress, and most of her early scenes when she's engaged to Cary Grant involve her trying to maneuver an enormous mink muff or armpiece, and keep in on her elbow. What is that thing, anyhow? It's triangular in shape, or really more like a conch shell, and sometimes it seems she can get her whole arm into it, up to one shoulder, and at other times it seems tiny, designed to cover a few fingers. Clearly it has the better of Doris Nolan. She's great and she can really stand up to Cary Grant for most of the movie. He plays Johnny Case, a former circus acrobat, who gets engaged to Julia in the Finger Lakes and never knew how rich she really was until given a tour through her mansion by one of those 1930s butlers, the kind who can't stand their own kind but don't like their bosses either.Johnny Case uses his circus training by somersaulting his way through the cvault like depths of the Seton mansion. He stops in front of an imposing John Singer Sargent painting of an elderly statesman. It turns out to be Julia's grandfather. "Judas!" he cries out. "Julia, why didn't you tell me you were descended from THAT Seton?"The best actors are probably Jean Dixon and Edward Everett Horton, who play Johnny's "gay parents," Nick Potter and Susan Elliott. They just love the way he scrambles over them, a young puppy in their tiny Bohemian village set-up. He kisses them equally, calls them both "fellas," he's enthusiastic and wriggly as a kid. At first when he tells them he's engaged to Julia, they can only imagine that she must be some kind of gold-digger and they plead with their "lad" not to let it get too far. Piles of books tremble on the floor and sheet music flies everywhere as the three collapse onto a couch, Nick and Susan sitting literally on top of Johnny to keep him single and out of Julia's clutches. Well, the last laugh belongs to them of course. They have magnificent timing and Dixon especially has so much Sapphic panache I wonder why I have never noticed her performance before. Once your Hepburninator has been installed, you too will be noticing all sorts of marvelous details about HOLIDAY you never had the energy for before.(After researching the matter, I see that oddly enough, this was Dixon's last role in the movies, though she lived another 43 years! Who could she have pissed off with her performance here I wonder!)