Melancholy and Anti-Capitalism in Holiday (1938)
What do a home and a heart have in common?
Both can be broken.
Holiday, George Cukor’s New Years dramedy about an everyman (Cary Grant) who falls for his future sister-in-law (Katharine Hepburn) is balanced on a knife’s edge. On one side is the Great Depression, on the other, the Second World War. And dangling by a thread in the middle is one precarious holiday party. Holiday is a whirlwind romance in which the characters’ end goal is freedom rather than romantic love. In a sense, romantic love is freedom, or having the freedom to choose love.
At the beginning of the film, Johnny Case (Grant) arrives at a palatial Fifth Avenue mansion seeking his fiancée, Julia Seton (Doris Nolan). In a reasonable misunderstanding, Johnny assumes that this is Julia’s workplace rather than where she grew up. After all, 10 days may not be enough time to get to know someone well enough to propose, but surely Julia would have found time to mention that she comes from a robber-baron banking family, right? Johnny, a grocer’s son who’s been working since he was 10, is understandably dumbstruck by the revelation, first elated that he’ll be marrying into such a prosperous family, then hesitant when Julia tells him that marrying a Seton means becoming a Seton with all the trappings and calculations of wealth. This is all a bit much to process for Johnny, from whom the film takes its title when he says he wants to take a holiday before settling down into a lifelong career.
JOHNNY: I want to find out why I’m working. The answer can’t be just to pay bills and pile up more money.”
In contrast to Johnny’s desire to see the world before he settles down is Linda Seton’s (Hepburn)desire to see the world at all. As the oldest of three in the absence of their mother, she’s taken on the role of caretaker for her younger siblings, putting their needs and safety before hers at every turn. Under the thumb of her bullying capitalistic father, Linda has little opportunity to be her own person. Her chemistry with Johnny is immediate and warm, as though they’ve been waiting a lifetime to meet one another.
So much of Holiday takes place in a children’s playroom, suspended between past and future. Much like the international context the film existed in, the themes dangle over a precipice as well. The playroom, though intended for children, is not populated by them. Rather, it is where Linda and Johnny find an understanding of each other, it allows them both an escape. The playroom was a haven for Linda, Julia, and their depressive, alcoholic younger brother Ned (Lew Ayres) when their mother was alive, and serves double the purpose in her absence. Not unlike the nursery in Peter Pan, the modest playroom amidst the Seton family’s grand Manhattan home allows its occupants to indulge in dreams. Johnny can imagine a life where he is neither living paycheck to paycheck, nor stifled by a job that kills his spirit. Linda recalls daydreams of being a nurse, artist, actress or anything that would get her out of the house. Her brother Ned defies his father’s disregard for art and showcases his musical talents. Only Julia no longer relies on the nursery-as-haven. All grown up in a way her siblings haven’t been able to, she seeks her father’s approval and shares his worldview.
The playroom sees not only a longing for childhood but a return to the innocence of it. With stuffed giraffes, unfinished piano concertos and and farcical puppet shows abound, this small band of misfits imagine an alternate reality where hope is not such a dangerous thing. Most striking are Johnny’s displays of acrobatics, drawing on Grant’s circus background. Several times he does “back flip flops” or other vaudevillian stunts, but the most iconic is when Johnny lifts Linda onto his shoulders from which the pair fall into perfectly coordinated somersaults. Camaraderie, the act of Knowing a person in the most necessary way you can — of looking at them and realising that they’ve felt something you believed to be horribly unique — makes children of them. Then, everything crashes back down to Earth with the reappearance of Mr. Seton.
and Flying Trapeze Club.
The message of “rich people have feelings too, and sometimes they’re sad” wouldn’t work without such a tight script and vulnerable performances. Considering the year it was made, this message seems seems out of touch at best and callous at worst in light of the Depression. But, that isn’t where it stops. Holiday goes so far as to condemn the wealthy, it condemns wealth itself. An excess of money comes at the expense of your empathy, a fact which we don’t have to look far for real-world examples of. Mr. Seton’s wealth has made him a cruel and unpleasant man, and his palatial house into a prison for his children. Were Johnny to go through with marrying Julia — it should come as no surprise that he doesn’t; he leaves her at the house rather than the alter — and everything that entails, a life like that would suck the heart right out of him. Instead, Johnny leaves her, her father, and her money to take his holiday as planned. Linda, after promising she’ll return for Ned, who cannot yet find the courage to stand up to their father, goes after him. This is a story I can imagine existing in no other era, you cannot forget the time it was being made.
LINDA: compared to the life I lead, the last man in a chain gang thoroughly enjoys himself.
As is the case with several of her films, Katharine Hepburn is at top form playing a character similar enough to herself that the lines between performance and persona blur. Linda is a trick mirror between the character adapted from Philip Barry’s stage play (Barry also penned The Philadelphia Story, adapted into the most critically-acclaimed Grant-Hepburn collaboration), the Kate persona constructed by the studios, and the Katharine audiences could never know. Like Linda, Hepburn was born to a prominent family of New England WASPs with a surgeon for a father and a mother who’d go on to found Planned Parenthood. Also like Linda, she was too much in a way that chafed with her social status. Whether it was dressing as a boy called Jimmy until her teens, nearly flunking out of Bryn Mawr College because of her refusal to go to class, followed by a sudden rebirth into a vivacious young person who performed in campus theatre and swam naked in fountains, or her refusal as a movie star to wear anything other than pants, there was a clear clash between the personal and the public.
Several of Hepburn’s best-known and best roles also fall under this archetype. Tracy Lord, the brash trouser-wearing socialite from The Philadelphia Story (1940) is an inverse of Linda Seton, with her haughty attitude and distant relationships. In 1933’s Little Women, she plays Jo March as ebullient and rowdy without sacrificing emotional weight. Sylvia Scarlett (1932) is an otherwise mediocre film elevated by the genius casting of Hepburn as a down-on-her-luck crossdressing scammer at the centre of a downright Shakespearean love triangle. Even her turn as ditzy but earnest heiress Susan Vance in Bringing Up Baby, one of the most feminine characters in her oeuvre, she has an equal share of physical comedy with Grant’s beleaguered straight man, Dr. Huxley.
That which makes Holiday the most melancholy, is a secret history that the majority of viewers, modern or historical would not be aware of. Linda’s brother Ned lingers around the edge of the film. A manner of darkly-touched comic relief, one hopes to laugh at his character if only so that it would precede the catharsis of crying. In contrast to Julia, who has seemingly few aspirations beyond being a socialite, and Linda, who has always been too restless to find a passion, Ned is a talented musician. He’s good enough that he could make a career out of it, if his father didn’t worship at the shrine of capitalism. Ned drinks to cope with the brunt of his father’s disdain, and receives more scorn for his drinking. It’s a familiar archetype, and despite his lack of character resolution, Ayers’ performance is the best in the film. Alternatively melancholy and mocking, Ned haunts the house, reminding Mr. Seton of his dead wife and failure to raise a successor. But, there is more than the image of the morose musician that adds an extra layer of tragedy to this story.
In real life, Katharine was the second of six children. She had several brothers, but none so beloved as Tom, two years older than her. Tom planned on following in their father’s footsteps and becoming a surgeon himself; he was a scholar and recently won an athletics prize for football. He was also catastrophically anxious, beyond academic pressures or rejection from a potential romantic partner, as biographers and reporters have long speculated. In an effort to ease the boy’s anxiety, 15-year-old Tom and 13-year-old Kathy went to visit their aunt in Greenwich village over Easter Break. Only one of those children returned. The day they were set to board a train back to Connecticut, Tom Hepburn hanged himself in the attic. Kathy was the one to find his body. His motivations died with him, though newspapers speculated all they wanted, and the family insisted it was an accident gone wrong.
I seek not to impose my own post-mortem armchair diagnosis on Hepburn. There is no way on Earth I’d ever be able to understand the lasting trauma that moment had on her. However, it is impossible for me to watch Holiday without thinking of a child finding her brother’s body. The first time I watched Holiday, I was unaware of this context. I find rewatching it in full difficult, aching every time the siblings were in a shot together. I wonder if Hepburn too, was remembering her own beloved brother.
It is a strange thing to think of this movie as a romance. I’ve danced around discussions of love because Johnny and Linda’s dynamic almost doesn’t read as romance. It reads as two people trying their hardest to prevent the other from making the worst mistake of their life. But if that isn’t love, then I’m not sure what else is worthy of the title.
