The basic Grant type, dating from films like Topper and The Awful Truth (both 1937), was a complex amalgam of leading-man charms: an irresistible but ultimately unknowable scamp; a man whose mere entrance into a scene suggested that spontaneity, irreverence, and possibly danger were afoot. His characters always seem to have an existence that extends, temporally and spatially, beyond what can be seen on the screen. Even Johnny Case, one of the sunniest of Grant’s screwball-era heroes, is a man with secrets. Summing up his past life to Linda, Johnny casually mentions that he has been working since the age of ten. Cukor’s touch is far too light to let him emphasize the suffering implied by this backstory, but he chooses to have Grant deliver it while riding a child’s tricycle, communicating at once the character’s playful insouciance and the pathos of his lost childhood.



Grant could play klutzy and bumbling, like the virginal paleontologist of Bringing Up Baby, or sly and manipulative, like the rascally news editor of His Girl Friday (1940), while still maintaining that untouchable core of reserve. And as Hitchcock would explore later in the forties in Suspicion and Notorious, he could also use his surface affability to hint at untapped wells of malice. But late-thirties screwball comedy was the first natural habitat for the free-roaming specimen that was Cary Grant, and Holiday is an example of that genre at its simplest and freshest.



The story is as slender and diaphanous as the white scarf pinned to one shoulder of the distinctive long-sleeved black gown Hepburn wears in the movie’s climactic party scene (the costumes are by Robert Kalloch, billed simply as Kalloch, who would dress many of the grandes dames of screwball: Myrna Loy in Shadow of the Thin Man, Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth, Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday). Grant’s Johnny Case, having just before the movie begins met and fallen in love with a young woman at a holiday resort at Lake Placid, drops by the apartment of his frie­nds Nick and Susan (Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon) to tell them the good news. The simple apartment of the Potters, a mildly bohemian pair of wisecrackers, provides an earth­­bound counterpoint to the lofty upper-class world Johnny is about to enter.



Most of the rest of the action takes place in the Setons’ city-block-sized Manhattan mansion, moving between the oppressively formal downstairs, with its double curving staircase, and the cozy upstairs “playroom,” a welcoming if regressive space still filled with the old musical instruments and toys of the Seton siblings’ youth. This is where the three grown Seton kids—the passionate but frustrated Linda, the self-loathing alcoholic Ned (a quietly tragic Lew Ayres), and the more conventional and ultimately materialistic Julia (Doris Nolan), the original object of Johnny’s affections—come to escape the demands of their generous but overbearing banker father (Henry Kolker). The playroom is also associated with the Setons’ beloved late mother, who, it is implied, encouraged the children in the musical and artistic pursuits they’ve now abandoned.

When Mr. Seton throws Julia a lavish white-tie-and-tails engagement bash against Linda’s express wishes—she wanted to celebrate her sister’s happiness with an intimate family gathering upstairs—the playroom becomes the space of a mutinous party within the party, where the groom-to-be eventually ends up as well. Johnny’s uncertainty about his hasty engagement to Julia only increases as he grows closer to her vibrant if eccentric sister. Weaving in and out of this romantic intrigue is an ongoing clash between two sets of values: the elder Seton’s belief, shared by Julia, in the steady accumulation of wealth, property, and status versus Johnny’s more personal vision of success as the ability to buy himself the period of freedom and self-discovery referred to in the title.



