Barnes & Noble

Based on a successful Broadway play by Philip Barry, this delightful 1938 comedy reunited Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, who had teamed so felicitously earlier that year in Bringing Up Baby and were later to work their magic in The Philadelphia Story, another Barry adaptation. Grant plays a cheerful but impecunious nonconformist who becomes engaged to the snobby daughter (Doris Nolan) of a millionaire banker (Henry Kolker). In getting acquainted with the family, he finds himself drawn to his fiancée's sister (Hepburn), a rebellious young spitfire with little use for convention. Also along for the ride are Lew Ayres, as Hepburn's cynical, disillusioned, perpetually drunk brother, and Edward Everett Horton, playing Grant's fun-loving but henpecked friend. Holiday unfolds largely indoors on lavishly appointed sets peopled with glamorously gowned females and dinner-jacketed males. The dialogue is delightfully sharp, and George Cukor's customarily precise direction elicits letter-perfect line readings from his unusually well cast players. The film’s principal theme -- that life's riches can't be counted in dollars and cents -- might have carried considerably more weight in the Depression era than it does today. But Holiday still scores as grand entertainment, with Grant and Hepburn lighting up the screen in their scenes together. Ed Hulse

All Movie Guide

Both film versions of Phillip Barry's stage comedy Holiday have their merits, but the 1938 version has the added advantage of supercharged star power. Katharine Hepburn and Doris Nolan play Linda and Julia Seton, two daughters of a very well-to-do family. Linda feels a bit lost in the shuffle as sister Julia prepares to marry self-made financier Cary Grant. Hepburn has always rebelled against her privileged trappings, and finds a kindred spirit in the unorthodox, iconoclastic Grant. On the verge of compromising his down-to-earth values with his marriage to the wealth-obsessed Nolan, Grant chooses instead to plight his troth with soul-mate Hepburn, celebrating his "liberation" by doing several cartwheels. Donald Ogden Stewart is careful to bring the pre-Depression frivolities of the Barry play up-to-date, first by changing the character of Grant's best friend (played in both films by Edward Everett Horton) from a lazy socialite to a dedicated professor, and by including several lines indicating how out of touch the privileged classes are--and choose to remain--with 1930s realities. The only element in which the remake does not improve on the original is in the casting of Hepburn's alcoholic younger brother; charming though Lew Ayres is in the 1938 film, he is still outclassed by Monroe Owsley in Holiday (1930). Katharine Hepburn managed to temporarily defray her "box office poison" onus when Holiday proved to be a success; alas, her next film, Bringing Up Baby (which reteamed her with Grant), was a financial bust, compelling her to return to Broadway--where she made a spectacular comeback in another Philip Barry play, The Philadelphia Story. Hal Erickson

Product Details

• UPC: 043396114166
• Source: SONY PICTURES
• Region Code: 1
• Presentation: B&W, Pan & Scan
• Language: English
• Time: 1:36:00
• Sales Rank: 408

This DVD is also available as part of a box set:

• The Cary Grant Box Set

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