Holiday (1938)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Holiday (1938) – G. Cukor

I thought this was going to be a screwball comedy, given the time (late ‘30s) and the stars (Cary Grant & Katharine Hepburn) but that isn’t what it was at all.  And I don’t even think it was a comedy at all – or maybe it just hit some kind of nerve that led me to ponder, not laugh.  Grant plays a free-thinking young man who is in the business world only to make money to allow him to take a long holiday and figure out the world and his place in it. He doesn’t really discuss this with the girl he gets engaged to (after a whirlwind romance at a ski resort on Lake Placid) who turns out to be from an enormously rich family with a father who values “good breeding” and “credentials”.  Grant has the latter but not the former.  Once he’s won over the father by his business acumen, he doesn’t seem to realise that his plan to drop out won’t go over as well – and he his shocked to find out that his fiancée also doesn’t agree.  They are too wedded to the capitalist and materialist values that were instilled in them.  But sister Linda (Hepburn) is the black sheep of the family and, of course, the perfect match for Grant – except that he’s engaged to her sister.  To me, this didn’t seem funny but more tragic.  Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon are around for some laughs – or at least they are jovial and sympathetic as Grant’s old mates (possibly his foster parents?) who also don’t care about status or position.  But the movie made me reflect on whether I, too, have gotten stuck in the grind and routine of life, forgetting my purpose, and in need of a holiday of the kind Grant desires -- but age 30 and age 50 are very different times.  Oh to be young and free (-thinking) again!