Rating: NR
Genre:
Comedy
Release Date: 12/05/2006
SubTitles: English/French/KO/Por/Espanol
Dubbed: English
Sound: DD2
Run Time: 96 Minutes
Distributor/Studio: Sony Pictures
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, All Movie Guide
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