Holiday (George Cukor, 1938)

So.

Pat bought this DVD a long while ago, but we hadn't watched it together until last night - I think I was put off every time by these cheesy promotional images in which poor Cary Grant manages to look like he's anxiously forcing a smile and wishing that he was somewhere that he actually wants to be.

In the end, I was really glad that we saw it; and my prejudices about it were confirmed. It's a star vehicle through and through. Cary Grant plays a lawyer who has met a charming woman on holiday, and has arranged, impetuously, to get engaged to her. When he turns up at her father's house, he discovers that she is the daughter of a millionaire. And when we see her for the first time, we discover that the charming, witty girl that he has described in the very first scene is not, as we've been led to expect from the cheesy photos, Katherine Hepburn, but the dull, conventional Julia Seton (Doris Nolan), who is convinced that he can make a financial success of himself, that she can make him into an image of the self-made grandfather whose portrait hangs on the wall (and what is it about Cary Grant that leaves him, as in Notorious, overlooked by the portraits of his disapproving family and inlaws?) . Hepburn is her sister: unconventional and lonely, trapped in their cold museum of a house. The film needs to show the two stars getting together: Julia Seton stands in their way.

What Holiday left me realising, most of all, was what an amazing actress Katherine Hepburn is: I finished the movie in a warm daze of admiration. The essence of her screen identity in her best movies (e.g. The Philadelphia Story) is a process of self-discovery: she embodies a character who realises, over the course of ninety minutes, and as we watch her, that she has emotional capabilities and depths that she had previously been unaware of, that she can love and invite love. Hepburn is a mannered actress, and even her suggestions of a depth of character under the veneer depend at first on vocal mannerism (that lowering of her voice, at once a sneer and a suggestion of rough panic) - but then, as the film proceeds, her performance seems to discover an identity beyond that mannerism. That's what makes her so great, and so beautiful: that she can present herself on screen as the star that she is, so thoroughly aware of her established persona, so formidable, and also as a woman learning, before our eyes, what lies beyond that persona. And I wasn't prepared here for the pathos of that realisation, for the sadness of a woman who comes to see that in her isolation from the conventions of her surroundings, she may have put herself beyond love.

Holiday is a dull film, though, however captivating she and Cary are, because Hepburn's character discovers nothing, over the course of the film, that she didn't know at the beginning - and that we didn't know from the beginning. That's to say, she discovers that Cary Grant is charming, that he brings life into a deathly house. She already knows this when she first sees him. And we know it before the film even starts.

I give this film a B.