A Film Canon

 

 

Nowhere else in the screwball canon is the claustrophobia of wealth as evident as in Holiday, most of which transpires in a single mansion, over one afternoon and evening. This transforms conversation into so many frenzied bursts of pent-up energy, on a continuum with the spontaneous singing, dancing, acrobatics and play-acting that take their cue from the instruments, toys and circus equipment of the playroom - "the one fun room in the house" - whose escapist potential is expanded into the holiday of the title. That said, the omnipresence of the mansion makes it difficult for newcomer Johnny Case (Cary Grant), or heiress Linda Seton (Katharine Hepburn), to articulate the rationale for this holiday in anything other than negative terms, as a vague respite from both business and leisure - and Johnny is in fact most convincing when he translates it back into the language of a career plan, albeit with the paradoxical insistence that retirement precede working life. Combined with Ned Seton's (Lew Ayres) drunken "Declaration of Independence" from his entrepreneurial father, this clarifies the holiday as a period of reflection upon what it means to be American, and, more specifically, on how Johnny might fulfil his spiritual kinship with the Setons' grandfather, who entered business as a "plain man of the people". This reversal, or elision, of generational authority explains the infantilisation of adults ("Come on Da-Da, let's go Bye-Bye"), as well as the sense that the young have arrived at a moment of crisis, at which they need to formulate some radical alternative to aging itself.