Product: Holiday (1938)
Rating: 5.0
One of two Grant-Hepburn Masterpieces of 1938
This is a marvelous screen comedy, though bizarrely enough, it might be the second best pairing of Hepburn and Grant in 1938. BRINGING UP BABY was released in February of that year, and HOLIDAY near the end. I have seen both of these films on numerous occasions, but rewatching them back to back recently was a revelation. The characters they play in each film are quite different from each other. In BRINGING UP BABY, Hepburn is the ultimate ditz, an utterly out-of-control mischief-maker. One could almost imagine Carole Lombard playing the role instead of Hepburn. But in HOLIDAY, Hepburn is playing the under control, highly intelligent character with which we are all more familiar. In HOLIDAY she is far more self-possessed. In BRING UP BABY, she is merely possessed.Likewise, Cary Grant undergoes a transformation from one film to the other. In BRINGING UP BABY, he is extraordinarily uptight, repressed, indecisive, and very much the intellectual. In HOLIDAY, he is a self-made man, completely unrepressed, and laid back in even the most uncomfortable situations. And he is very much able to make up his own mind.The films themselves are contrasts in style. BRINGING UP BABY is one of the screwiest of screwball comedies. HOLIDAY is a more somber comedy that very much shows its origins as a stage play. Family relationships and life decisions are at the heart of the latter; nuttier and nuttier situations the former.One of the joys of watching HOLIDAY is seeing the very athletic Cary Grant do a couple of acrobatic stunts. While it is possible that the handstand near the end was performed by a stunt double (I rewatched it carefully, and the Grant character walks out of a room with his back towards the viewers, and does a flip without really showing his face--it is possible that a double was used), it is equally possible that Grant did the handstand himself, since he did start off his show business career as an acrobat.