HOLIDAY (1938)
Randwick Ritz, Sydney:
7:00 PM
Wednesday April 30*
2:30 PM
Thursday May 1
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
4:25 PM
Sunday May 11*
1:30 PM
Tuesday May 13
*denotes session will include an introduction
Rating: G
Duration: 95 minutes
Country: USA
Language: English
Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Lew Ayres
Director: George Cukor
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
7:00 PM
Wednesday April 30*
2:30 PM
Thursday May 1
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
4:25 PM
Sunday May 11*
1:30 PM
Tuesday May 13
*denotes session will include an introduction
Rating: G
Duration: 95 minutes
Country: USA
Language: English
Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Lew Ayres
Director: George Cukor
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
4K RESTORATION – AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE
“For sparkling wit and ineffable melancholy, Holiday … is simply nonpareil.” – Justin Chang, the Los Angeles Times
A nonconformist society girl finds a kindred spirit in her sister’s fiancé in George Cukor’s wistful and wonderful romantic comedy now restored in 4K. Johnny Case (Cary Grant), a self-made man who has laboured since early childhood, intends to take an extended sabbatical following his marriage to the upper-class Julia Seton (Doris Nolan). While Johnny is emphatically supported by Julia’s eccentric older sister Linda (Katharine Hepburn) and downtrodden brother Ned (Lew Ayres), his plan conflicts with the ambitions of the siblings’ tyrannical banker father (Henry Kolker).
In the same year the two actors were paired in Howard Hawks’ definitive screwball Bringing Up Baby, and two years before they would reunite with Cukor for The Philadelphia Story, Hepburn and Grant showcased their peerless chemistry and physicality in what is arguably their finest collaboration, and one of the greatest films of the 1930s.
“Often underrated by comparison with The Philadelphia Story (both are based on plays by Philip Barry), but even better because its glitteringly polished surface is undermined by veins of real feeling, it is one of Cukor's best films.” – Tom Milne
“I love it not just for its wit and its tenderness, but for its ruthlessness.” – Stephanie Zacharek
Introduced by Jane Mills at Ritz Cinemas and by Philippa Hawker at Lido Cinemas
“For sparkling wit and ineffable melancholy, Holiday … is simply nonpareil.” – Justin Chang, the Los Angeles Times
A nonconformist society girl finds a kindred spirit in her sister’s fiancé in George Cukor’s wistful and wonderful romantic comedy now restored in 4K. Johnny Case (Cary Grant), a self-made man who has laboured since early childhood, intends to take an extended sabbatical following his marriage to the upper-class Julia Seton (Doris Nolan). While Johnny is emphatically supported by Julia’s eccentric older sister Linda (Katharine Hepburn) and downtrodden brother Ned (Lew Ayres), his plan conflicts with the ambitions of the siblings’ tyrannical banker father (Henry Kolker).
In the same year the two actors were paired in Howard Hawks’ definitive screwball Bringing Up Baby, and two years before they would reunite with Cukor for The Philadelphia Story, Hepburn and Grant showcased their peerless chemistry and physicality in what is arguably their finest collaboration, and one of the greatest films of the 1930s.
“Often underrated by comparison with The Philadelphia Story (both are based on plays by Philip Barry), but even better because its glitteringly polished surface is undermined by veins of real feeling, it is one of Cukor's best films.” – Tom Milne
“I love it not just for its wit and its tenderness, but for its ruthlessness.” – Stephanie Zacharek
Introduced by Jane Mills at Ritz Cinemas and by Philippa Hawker at Lido Cinemas
FILM NOTES
By John Baxter
By John Baxter
Paris-based
Australian John Baxter’s latest book is a biography of actor Charles Boyer.
GEORGE CUKOR
George Cukor
helped import from Broadway that crucial respect for text and character which
Hollywood, until then preoccupied with appearance alone, had scorned. His
emphasis on using theatre-trained performers superseded the practice of buying
foreign actors solely for their comportment, diction, good looks or ease in
evening dress.
It was as “a woman’s director” that Cukor won his foothold in the movies, and he was shrewd enough, while eliciting persuasive performances from Spencer Tracy, Charles Boyer and Ronald Colman, not to fight the cliché. Katharine Hepburn, who starred in his first Hollywood success, A Bill of Divorcement, went on to become his most consistent collaborator but it was with the recalcitrant Greta Garbo that he proved his skill. Visiting the set of Camille, MGM studio boss Irving Thalberg took one look at the actress on the other side of the sound stage and knew Cukor could handle her. ‘You see,’ he whispered to a helper. ‘She’s unguarded.’
Privately, Cukor shared screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart’s socialist beliefs, and would later direct his anti-Fascist Keeper of the Flame, also with Hepburn. Politics are implicit in Holiday. Philip Barry’s original play emerged from the financial boom preceding the Great Depression and the remake takes place in a time of similar tentative prosperity, adding an ominous character to its humour. Cukor called that time ‘a period of undercover Fascism in the country. Certain things were in the air but hadn’t come out into the open.’ (1) It’s not hard to see Cary Grant’s character, Case, as one of those Americans, later stigmatised as ‘premature anti-Fascists’, who became embroiled in the Spanish Civil War.
It was as “a woman’s director” that Cukor won his foothold in the movies, and he was shrewd enough, while eliciting persuasive performances from Spencer Tracy, Charles Boyer and Ronald Colman, not to fight the cliché. Katharine Hepburn, who starred in his first Hollywood success, A Bill of Divorcement, went on to become his most consistent collaborator but it was with the recalcitrant Greta Garbo that he proved his skill. Visiting the set of Camille, MGM studio boss Irving Thalberg took one look at the actress on the other side of the sound stage and knew Cukor could handle her. ‘You see,’ he whispered to a helper. ‘She’s unguarded.’
Privately, Cukor shared screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart’s socialist beliefs, and would later direct his anti-Fascist Keeper of the Flame, also with Hepburn. Politics are implicit in Holiday. Philip Barry’s original play emerged from the financial boom preceding the Great Depression and the remake takes place in a time of similar tentative prosperity, adding an ominous character to its humour. Cukor called that time ‘a period of undercover Fascism in the country. Certain things were in the air but hadn’t come out into the open.’ (1) It’s not hard to see Cary Grant’s character, Case, as one of those Americans, later stigmatised as ‘premature anti-Fascists’, who became embroiled in the Spanish Civil War.
THE FILM
Despite Cary Grant demonstrating
that he could still do the back-flips and somersaults of his vaudeville days, Holiday is less a screwball comedy than a fable, in which, as in My Man Godfrey and Tovarich, a few principled individuals educate the decadent rich.
The classic self-made man, Grant’s Johnny Case has made a killing on the stock market but, instead of building it into a fortune, intends to spend it on travelling to Europe and “discovering himself.” Falling in love with heiress Linda Seton almost persuades him to trade his dream for her fortune, until he meets her unconventional sister Julia, as desperate to escape a life of privilege as Linda is to embrace it. The two flee gratefully into an unplanned but more interesting future.
Katharine Hepburn shines as Julia; the colourless Doris Nolan as Linda might almost have been hand-picked to pale by comparison. Whether frenetic with enthusiasm or languishing in despair, Hepburn dominates every scene in which she appears. She’d coveted the role since she understudied Julia in the 1927 Broadway production, and had hoped to be cast in a 1930 film version. In 1938, exhibitors had just labeled her, with Joan Crawford and Marlene Dietrich, as “box office poison”, so RKO were glad to turn a profit on her worthless contract by lending her to Columbia for the remake. (Harry Cohn at Columbia also accommodated her by hiring Grant and borrowing George Cukor from MGM to direct.)
Grant, more often seen as calm and imperturbable, is here cast unconventionally as a disturbing influence, a stone thrown into the calm pond of wealth and privilege. His ebullience shakes the Setons’ complacency and helps lighten the self-pity of alcoholic youngest son Ned (Lew Ayres). Edward Everett Horton has fun with the puckish Professor Potter, an affectionate portrait of screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart. But this is no Bringing Up Baby. The best jokes are playwright Philip Barry’s, like the way the snobs instinctively amend Johnny’s surname ‘Case’ to the more respectable ‘Chase’ and mishear ‘Potter’ as ‘Porter’. Stewart’s contribution, he said, was ‘staying out of the way of a very good play.’
‘It’s the story of a man who doesn’t want to marry a Whitney,’ Stewart told me. We were speaking in the mansion high over north London, where he fled in 1951 from the Hollywood blacklist. (His office doorstop was the Oscar won for adapting another Philip Barry play, The Philadelphia Story.)
Stewart graduated from Yale, briefly sold bonds with Scott Fitzgerald, ran with the bulls at Pamplona with Hemingway, and dined with William Randolph Hearst at San Simeon. The monied Whitneys were his friends. But how would they react, he wondered, if an outsider started expressing political views of the type which, in the film, Seton père [the father] calls ‘unAmerican’?
The idea flowered during a 1936 London visit. ‘I didn’t know how tall Communists were,’ Stewart said, ‘so I asked the doorman at Claridge’s, where we were staying, if he knew anything about communism. He said ‘No, sir’, but directed me to a bookshop. I bought John Strachey’s The Coming Struggle for Power and read it going back on the boat. It was a revelation!’
An improbable radical, Stewart was nevertheless embraced by the Hollywood left, becoming president of the Anti-Nazi League, the American League of Writers, and the Anti-Franco League. (‘I loved to be president.’) His connections led him into areas where he could apply moral blackmail to the swimming-pool set. He also attracted the attention of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, which marked him for investigation. Forewarned, Stewart and his wife relocated in Britain.
On that 1938 trip to London, he’d bought a dozen stiff shirts, a dozen soft evening shirts, and six black bow ties, in expectation of a lively season. ‘When I got back to America, I started boring friends about socialism. I knew I was boring them because I didn’t get invited to as many parties. You know, I still have a few of those shirts? They’re a bit yellow, but mostly unworn.’
‘Out of five films,’ François Truffaut said of George Cukor, ‘[he] will make one masterpiece, three that are good and one that is interesting.’ Most would place Holiday somewhere between the last two categories. These were lean years for Cukor. He would shortly work once more with Donald Ogden Stewart and Scott Fitzgerald, both uncredited, on The Women, then clash, to his cost, with David O. Selznick, who fired him from what might have been a one-out-of-five masterpiece, Gone With the Wind.
Notes
1. All quotes from Cukor and Stewart are from private conversations with the author.
The classic self-made man, Grant’s Johnny Case has made a killing on the stock market but, instead of building it into a fortune, intends to spend it on travelling to Europe and “discovering himself.” Falling in love with heiress Linda Seton almost persuades him to trade his dream for her fortune, until he meets her unconventional sister Julia, as desperate to escape a life of privilege as Linda is to embrace it. The two flee gratefully into an unplanned but more interesting future.
Katharine Hepburn shines as Julia; the colourless Doris Nolan as Linda might almost have been hand-picked to pale by comparison. Whether frenetic with enthusiasm or languishing in despair, Hepburn dominates every scene in which she appears. She’d coveted the role since she understudied Julia in the 1927 Broadway production, and had hoped to be cast in a 1930 film version. In 1938, exhibitors had just labeled her, with Joan Crawford and Marlene Dietrich, as “box office poison”, so RKO were glad to turn a profit on her worthless contract by lending her to Columbia for the remake. (Harry Cohn at Columbia also accommodated her by hiring Grant and borrowing George Cukor from MGM to direct.)
Grant, more often seen as calm and imperturbable, is here cast unconventionally as a disturbing influence, a stone thrown into the calm pond of wealth and privilege. His ebullience shakes the Setons’ complacency and helps lighten the self-pity of alcoholic youngest son Ned (Lew Ayres). Edward Everett Horton has fun with the puckish Professor Potter, an affectionate portrait of screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart. But this is no Bringing Up Baby. The best jokes are playwright Philip Barry’s, like the way the snobs instinctively amend Johnny’s surname ‘Case’ to the more respectable ‘Chase’ and mishear ‘Potter’ as ‘Porter’. Stewart’s contribution, he said, was ‘staying out of the way of a very good play.’
‘It’s the story of a man who doesn’t want to marry a Whitney,’ Stewart told me. We were speaking in the mansion high over north London, where he fled in 1951 from the Hollywood blacklist. (His office doorstop was the Oscar won for adapting another Philip Barry play, The Philadelphia Story.)
Stewart graduated from Yale, briefly sold bonds with Scott Fitzgerald, ran with the bulls at Pamplona with Hemingway, and dined with William Randolph Hearst at San Simeon. The monied Whitneys were his friends. But how would they react, he wondered, if an outsider started expressing political views of the type which, in the film, Seton père [the father] calls ‘unAmerican’?
The idea flowered during a 1936 London visit. ‘I didn’t know how tall Communists were,’ Stewart said, ‘so I asked the doorman at Claridge’s, where we were staying, if he knew anything about communism. He said ‘No, sir’, but directed me to a bookshop. I bought John Strachey’s The Coming Struggle for Power and read it going back on the boat. It was a revelation!’
An improbable radical, Stewart was nevertheless embraced by the Hollywood left, becoming president of the Anti-Nazi League, the American League of Writers, and the Anti-Franco League. (‘I loved to be president.’) His connections led him into areas where he could apply moral blackmail to the swimming-pool set. He also attracted the attention of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, which marked him for investigation. Forewarned, Stewart and his wife relocated in Britain.
On that 1938 trip to London, he’d bought a dozen stiff shirts, a dozen soft evening shirts, and six black bow ties, in expectation of a lively season. ‘When I got back to America, I started boring friends about socialism. I knew I was boring them because I didn’t get invited to as many parties. You know, I still have a few of those shirts? They’re a bit yellow, but mostly unworn.’
‘Out of five films,’ François Truffaut said of George Cukor, ‘[he] will make one masterpiece, three that are good and one that is interesting.’ Most would place Holiday somewhere between the last two categories. These were lean years for Cukor. He would shortly work once more with Donald Ogden Stewart and Scott Fitzgerald, both uncredited, on The Women, then clash, to his cost, with David O. Selznick, who fired him from what might have been a one-out-of-five masterpiece, Gone With the Wind.
Notes
1. All quotes from Cukor and Stewart are from private conversations with the author.
THE RESTORATION
The 4K restoration was
completed in 2019 by Sony Pictures Entertainment. The original sources
included a nitrate dupe negative and a nitrate print, both wet-gate scanned in
4K at Cineric, Inc., New York. As a result of the significant damage in the sources
(heavy scratches, missing footage, and printed in damage) elements were
conformed using the best image quality from the two sources. Conform and
color correction were completed at Roundabout Entertainment, Santa Monica, by
Senior Colorist, Sheri Eisenberg. Digital restoration was completed at Prasad,
Inc in Burbank, CA, with additional restoration by Prime Focus, Burbank. Audio
restoration was completed by Audio Mechanics, Burbank, using the original
variable density mono sound track negative. Supervised
by Rita Belda for SPE.
Director: George Cukor; Production Company: Columbia Pictures; Producer: Everett Riskin; Script: Donald Ogden Stewart, Sydney Buchman based on a play by Philip Barry; Photography: Franz Planer; Editor: Al Clark, Otto Meyer; Production Design: Stephen Goosson; Costumes: Robert Kalloch; Music: Sidney Cutner
Cast: Cary Grant (Johnny Case), Katharine Hepburn (Linda Seton), Doris Nolan (Julia Seton), Lew Ayres (Edward ‘Ned’ Seton), Henry Kolker (Edward Seton Sr), Edward Everett Horton (Professor Nick Potter), Jean Dixon (Susan Potter), Binnie Barnes (Laura Cram), Henry Daniell (Seton Cram)
USA| 1938 | 95 Mins | 4K DCP | B&W| English | G
Director: George Cukor; Production Company: Columbia Pictures; Producer: Everett Riskin; Script: Donald Ogden Stewart, Sydney Buchman based on a play by Philip Barry; Photography: Franz Planer; Editor: Al Clark, Otto Meyer; Production Design: Stephen Goosson; Costumes: Robert Kalloch; Music: Sidney Cutner
Cast: Cary Grant (Johnny Case), Katharine Hepburn (Linda Seton), Doris Nolan (Julia Seton), Lew Ayres (Edward ‘Ned’ Seton), Henry Kolker (Edward Seton Sr), Edward Everett Horton (Professor Nick Potter), Jean Dixon (Susan Potter), Binnie Barnes (Laura Cram), Henry Daniell (Seton Cram)
USA| 1938 | 95 Mins | 4K DCP | B&W| English | G