by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I thought I’d do something that Charles and I used to do
fairly often in our movie-watching but now do only rarely: run two versions of
the same story consecutively on the same night. This time our story was Philip
Barry’s play Holiday, which premiered on
Broadway in 1928 and in some ways is a 1960’s story in 1920’s garb: on a
vacation in Lake Placid 10 days before the main action begins, socialite and
heiress Julia Seton meets and instantly falls in love with Johnny Case. Case is
a young man who came from humble origins, worked his way through Harvard and
just masterminded a merger between two utility companies that will make him a
bundle and pave the way for a potentially major career in finance. He doesn’t
realize that Julia comes from a family with major money until he shows up at
the address she’s given him where she lives — and realizes it’s a palatial
mansion. Julia’s father, Edward Seton, is the son of a self-made man but he’s
picked up such an insufferable set of conventions about not only being a hereditary
millionaire himself but insisting that his children — he’s got three, all
grown, daughters Julia and Linda and son Ned — marry only people who already
have money and social connections. Meanwhile, Johnny is rethinking the path
he’s been on all his life and is thinking seriously of using his earnings from
the utility merger to take off for a few years and have a “holiday,” a break
from earning a living and building a career to give himself a chance to figure
out what he really wants to do
with his life.
Julia is aghast at her husband-to-be coming up with such a plan,
and her dad is even more viciously negative about it, but her sister Linda
thinks it’s a wonderful idea: Linda has been searching for an opportunity to
rebel against what she calls “the reverence for riches,” and though she doesn’t
explicitly set out to take Johnny away from her sister, that’s duly what
happens at the end, with Linda accompanying Johnny on a steamship to Paris for
his “holiday” and Julia left back home at the Seton manse with her dad,
presumably to wait for a more stable, more grounded and less free-spirited man
with an appropriate bank balance and social pedigree. There are also
interesting supporting characters, including the third Seton offspring, son
Ned, who’s being groomed to take over the family business (whatever it is) but
lives his days in an alcoholic haze and cares about little but getting
genteelly drunk (sometimes not-so-genteelly drunk) and avoiding as many
responsibilities as he can. There’s also a pair of distant cousins, Seton Cram
and his wife (Charles wondered why “Seton” would be the last name of some of
the characters and the first name of another, but it was common among
well-to-do families at the time to give their kids as a first name the maiden
name of a woman who’d married into the family — which is how Cole Porter got
his first name; his maternal grandfather was someone named J. D. Cole), who are
additional enforcers of the social and monetary rules by which the Setons in
general, and dad and Julia in particular, live. Holiday began life as a Broadway play that premiered
November 26, 1928 and ran for 229 performances — not a blockbuster but a solid
hit — and in the normal order of things it was bought by a movie studio (Pathé,
in the last throes of its existence as an independent company — the founding
branch in France would survive but the U.S. division would soon get absorbed by
RKO), though in the nearly two years between the debut of the play and the
release of the film on July 9, 1930 the Great Depression started, and all of a
sudden the conflicts driving this story — particularly the whole idea of a man
on his way to a fortune being willing to walk away from both it and the love of
a glamorous and rich woman — must have seemed excessively out of date.
Pathé
originally bought this as a vehicle for the musical star Ina Claire, but her
nine-month contract with them expired before it could be filmed and Ann
Harding, of all unlikely people, stepped into the role — not of Julia, at which
she would probably have been quite good, but of Linda, the free spirit who
doesn’t know she’s a free spirit and yearns to rebel against her dad’s idea of
a proper lifestyle. Pathé cast Mary Astor as Julia and put solid actors in the
men’s roles: Robert Ames (fresh from his triumph in Gloria Swanson’s first
talkie, The Trespasser) as
Johnny; Monroe Owsley as Ned (the only actor from the Broadway production to
repeat his role in the movie); Edward Everett Horton and Hedda Hopper as
Johnny’s socialite friends Nick and Susan Potter; Hallam Cooley as Seton Cram
and William Holden — no, not that
William Holden but a middle-aged character actor who also appeared in Dance,
Fools, Dance with Joan Crawford and Clark
Gable (the later, and far more famous, William Holden was originally named
“Beedle”!) — as the self-important father, Edward Seton. The play was adapted
by screenwriter Horace Jackson and directed by Edward H. Griffith, who had
nowhere nearly as illustrious career as his famous namesake D. W. but was a solid craftsman who made a number of very
interesting films, of which this is definitely one. The 1930 Holiday really seems like the beta version of a screwball
comedy, though Griffith’s pacing is just a bit too slow and ponderous for it to
take off and fly in the way similarly class-conscious stories did later in the
1930’s. But the basic plot is sturdy enough to work, the acting is certainly
competent (and Mary Astor better than that!) even though Edward Everett Horton
practically steals the movie with his down-to-earth characterization, and there
are haunting plot devices like the playroom Linda Seton has kept as it was when
her mom died and regards as an oasis of sanity and fun in her otherwise
museum-like manse — where Linda
and Johnny dance to a Regina music-box recording of Sol P. Levy’s “That Naughty
Waltz.” (The Regina, which we’ve already seen in operation in Ken Maynard’s
contemporary Western Smoking Guns
from 1934, was a giant music box whose songs were programmed on discs, so you
could have it play different songs the way you could with a record player.
Indeed, as record players developed and threatened to put the Regina company
out of business, Regina responded with a machine that could at least
theoretically play both.)
The second-act climax (even if you didn’t know in
advance that this movie was based on a stage play you could tell just by
looking at it where the original curtains fell!) takes place on New Year’s Eve
(thus adding Holiday to the oddly
short list of movies — Mystery of the Wax Museum, The Horn Blows at
Midnight, and Woody Allen’s recent and
utterly marvelous Whatever Works
— in which key sequences take place on New Year’s Eve), where Linda has wanted
to celebrate her sister’s engagement with a handful of people in the playroom,
and her dad has taken over the event and invited virtually the entire Social
Register for a thoroughly dull event enlivened only by a society-style dance
band and Ned’s alcoholic commentary on the whole drab affair. Holiday is also a transitional film in the history of
talkies; the actors deliver their lines relatively naturalistically and without
those … horrendous … pauses … that … make a lot of films from 1928 and 1929
almost totally unwatchable today, but the actors are still facing front and
center, treating the camera as if they were on a stage and it were the
audience, and director Griffith does surprisingly little of the shot-reverse
shot angling and cutting that became standard for long dialogue sequences in
the mid-1930’s. It also didn’t much help that the print we were watching was a
download from archive.org that was in poor shape technically; the soundtrack
was relatively clear but the picture often cut off the tops of people’s heads
in long shots and in one scene, set inside a car, the image washed out so that
we were essentially seeing little bits of people’s features in a sea of
off-white. Ironically, when we screened the 1938 version — a recent recording
from Turner Classic Movies (which showed this film twice in the last two weeks,
as part of their December “Star of the Month” tribute to Cary Grant and more
recently as part of a birthday celebration for Lew Ayres) — we noticed it
carried a UCLA film preservation credit; we can only hope somebody steps in
with a grant to restore the 1930 version as well!
