Holiday (1938)

George Cukor's Holiday (1938) is a fun but slight comedy. Playwright Philip Barry's satire of the idle rich seems quaint today despite its top-flight stars and ace director. The same cast and crew explored similar topics far better with The Philadelphia Story two years later.

Johnny Case (Cary Grant) is a noveaux rich man of the people who falls for Julia (Doris Nolan), the socialite daughter of old money patriarch Edward Seton (Henry Kolker). Johnny soon learns his in-laws have certain expectations of him, his free spirit and curiosity clashing with their staid worldview. When he meets Julia's sharp-tongued sister Linda (Katharine Hepburn) however, Johnny finds that can be wealthy without compromising their personality.

Holiday encapsulates Barry's preoccupations with high society. The movie is careful to avoid class dialectics: being rich isn't bad, but being a bore is unforgivable. Johnny's made it big on his own terms, personifying the American Dream. His faux-Horatio Alger story makes him both a financial success and a vivacious person with ideas and free will. His would-be in-laws maintain rigid codes: knowing the right people, behaving at parties and being generally complacent. When Julia claims that "going after money is the most exciting thing there is," viewers either laugh or recoil with horror. From then on we're only counting time until Johnny and Linda end up together.

Under Cukor's steady direction, Holiday moves briskly enough at 95 minutes, with sumptuous art direction and solid casting. The problem is that it's not very funny. It misses the screwball antics of His Girl Friday or The Lady Eve, falling readily on a conventional love triangle. The thematically handy but overlong New Years Party generates wry amusement, but few big laughs. A gag with the Professor (Edward Everett Horton) losing a dress shoe in a mud boot is about as clever as things get. The movie relies on star power to keep itself afloat.

Cary Grant isn't believable as a proletariat striver but his charm gets him over Johnny's rough patches. Katharine Hepburn plays a free-thinking socialite much less irritating than her scatterbrain from Bringing Up Baby. Lew Ayres (All Quiet on the Western Front) is hopelessly goofy though Henry Kolker makes a good straight man. Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon are scene-stealers as Johnny's good time pals.

Holiday is unremarkable fluff. Well-liked by fans of Grant and Hepburn, it's nothing that wouldn't be done better in George Cukor's follow-up project.