Watch Holiday For Free

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

. . . it's really hard to be a pimp, but it's a lot tougher to be a Wall Street banker, as HOLIDAY proves. Cary Grant's character, up-by-his-bootstraps Baltimore boy "Johnny Case," does not understand what Wall Street types know before they're done sucking their Binkies: He who dies with the most money, wins. Harvard-educated utilities specialist Johnny thinks he can take his commission from closing the "Bayshore deal" and run. "Retire young, and work old," as he puts it to his right-thinking fiancée, "Julia Seton." Julia, a member of the "60 Families" (today called "The One Per Cent") patiently tries to point out the fallacies in Johnny's thinking. It's not like the fleeting pleasures of youth will do you much good in the grave. People don't build monuments to guys who Hoboed the Seven Seas. You don't build up frontage for your five-story mansion on Fifth Avenue by being a banking dilettante. Though something such as the Bayshore deal might consist of five minutes of doodling on a napkin at your country club or favorite night spot (and constitute a whole decade's profit), you've got to keep your nose to the grind stone of the yacht club and nightly champagne circuit to make sure you capture the crucial opportunity to work your brain for five minutes when it comes along every ten years or so. When that five minutes of jotting down a few figures for an appropriate counterpart from the One Per Cent (or 60 Families) bears fruit and you make as much from a few pencil strokes as ten thousand of the "Little People" can make from a lifetime of hard physical labor, it's your responsibility to build a home big enough to house an entire village of the Ordinaries, and to Party like you've died and gone to Heaven already. Since Julia just can't get these quintessential American principles through Johnny's thick skull, this sad-sack loser gets delegated to take the Seton family's "Black Sheep" off their hands.

Holiday is my favourite Cary Grant film and my favourite of Cary Grant & Katharine Hepburn's partnership. Between this, Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story it's almost like having to choose my favourite child; yes all three are that good but ultimately Holiday is the most beloved of my offspring. I find Kate & Cary to be one of the five greatest instances of chemistry I've seen between an actor and actress (my other selections being Astaire & Rogers, Powell & Loy, Stewart & Sullivan and Fonda & Stanwyck), even preferring them to the longer running Tracy-Hepburn partnership.However, the two stars aren't actually romantically engaged throughout Holiday, with Johnny Case (Grant) preparing to get married to Julia Seaton (Doris Nolan), the sister of Linda Seaton (Hepburn). This dynamic in which Linda is more passionate about her sister's relationship than Julia herself and the obvious feelings she has for Johnny is a much more interesting and complex dynamic than the more standard romance. Linda is far more interesting than her comparably dull sister. The whole time I'm thinking to myself Kate & Cary are beyond perfect for each other in this coming together of two intellectuals. - I simply don't want to see them being involved with anyone else.I feel Cary Grant has never looked more youthful than he does in Holiday and even gets a rare opportunity to show off his acrobatic skills, with Hepburn even getting in on the action. I'll also take this opportunity to mention that man sure could wear clothes like no other. The discussions Kate & Cary engage on what their characters want to do with their lives are so deep and profound. The difficulty of finding their place in life, the obstacles of trying to live it and not wanting to miss out on an ever-changing world full of ideologies and ideas, all while trying to get by with an optimistic attitude despite the imperfections in their life. It's hard to take it all in on and decipher in a single viewing, which makes Holiday one of my most life-affirming movies.Katharine Hepburn, on the other hand, had the opportunity in her career to play roles which reflected her real-life personality as a non-conformist oddball. In Holiday she is the the black sheep in a wealthy, business-driven family. Linda is a character who comes up with what her family describes as "little ideas" which they outright dismiss. Her "little idea" of throwing an engagement party for Julia in their childhood playroom (a playroom which looks so much fun! You could almost set the entire movie in there) on New Year's Eve is one of the most powerful and harrowing moments I've seen in any film. The feeling of being an outsider and a lonely at that (I know I've been there before) has never been captured more effectively on celluloid than it has when Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn are dancing alone in the playroom and welcome in the New Year. I do make it an aim during a future new year's eve to watch Holiday with the film synchronized with real time so I can introduce the new year at the exact same time the character's in the movie do so.

An excellent Hollywood chamber drama. Cary Grant plays an investor who dreams of saving enough money for early retirement, and then discovering his real purpose in the world. He's set to marry the daughter of a banking tycoon for whom the accumulation of wealth is everything. Almost completely set within the family's sprawling mansion, the film is essentially composed of two extended set-pieces consisting of Grant's efforts to gain the father's marriage blessing and the ensuing New Year's Eve celebration. Grant gradually learns that his fiancée is very similar to her father, but the other sister (Katharine Hepburn) finds in him a kindred spirit, and a drunkard brother (Lew Ayres) encourages their budding infatuation. There's quite a lot of pleasant humor, but also a palpable sense of deep-seated resentment and stifled dreams that play out against a well-defined family dynamic. Most beautiful are the scenes set within a rustically designed room—an escape from the father's unwavering stoicism—viewed by the estranged characters as a revivifying place where the real living happens, divorced as it is from crippling bourgeois expectations. Cukor's economical direction makes the most of the geography of several rooms and Donald Ogden Stewart's screenplay is particularly attuned to the broken relationship between the old-fashioned father and Hepburn's free-thinking dreamer, as incisively drawn here as in The Philadelphia Story. Highly recommended.

Everything that "The Philadelphia Story" was, "Holiday" wasn't.If the point of Holiday's story was to convince me that the incredibly rich were just a bunch of boring, stuffy, petty, snivelling, tantrum-throwing, one-dimensional goofs (Yeah. That about covers it), then, yes, it certainly achieved its intended goal quite successfully.Holiday is a prefect example of why I generally detest and often avoid watching "Screwball" comedies from the 1930s and 40s.Its story was so contrived, predictable and riddled with every "poor-little-rich-girl" cliché in the book that it made my skin absolutely crawl in complete revulsion to everything that it supposedly stood for.One aspect of Holiday's "far-from-believable" story that really killed me had to do with the 3 spoiled-brat children (who were all around the age of 30) of wealthy banker, Edward Seton.These 3 big sucks clearly resented "daddy-dearest" for the dominating and (apparent) strangle-hold that he had on their lives. Yet these 3 little whining cry-babies continued to live under the same roof with this overbearing, money-grubbing, Wall Street monster. And that, to me, rendered them all a bunch of selfish, temperamental, hypocritical wimps as they greedily guzzled down his booze and paraded around in all of their tres' chic, designer outfits.Holiday was the sort of film whose story really sent out a very confused and mixed message about the super-wealthy set. It just couldn't decide whether it wanted the viewer to laugh at them, or to hate them, or to enviously desire to be just like them. But, whatever - This film's story was "Screwball" comedy at its absolute most detestable, in my opinion.And, besides all of that nonsense, I definitely thought that the chemistry between its 2 big-name stars, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, stank, big-time. And that's because there really was no chemistry between these 2, whatsoever.Of the 4 principal characters who dominated Holiday's story, it was Cary Grant's "I-just-wanna-bum-around-for-the-rest-of-my-life" role as John Case who rang the most false and pretentious.Immaculately groomed in his tailor-made suites and shiny shoes, I wasn't convinced, for even a minute, that this "good egg" wasn't even phased one bit by the possibilities available to him through all of Seton's financial wealth. To me, Case's phony, non-materialistic philosophy didn't hide the fact that beneath his apparent selfless intentions lurked a greedy, little gold-digger just waiting to pounce on all that dough.