Holiday

I've been incredibly industrious and crafty lately, but unfortunately all the yarn fruits of my labor must remain hidden for the time being, as they're gifts for people I love. Even though no one knows this blog actually exists, it still seems like tempting fate to toss up pictures!

I will say that everyone should go to Ravelry and drop $5 on this Feminist Killjoy hat. It's amazing. I can't wait to see it on the recipient's head, and I'm already planning to make another for myself. (I would recommend adding some repeats at the brim and the crown - the prototype I made was pretty shallow.)

I made cassoulet last night. It's one of my all-time favorite dishes (probably because it's replete with duck, for which I have an all-consuming passion) but I had long considered it way too complex for home-cooking. This recipe, which I found through David Lebovitz, convinced me otherwise. I couldn't even track down duck fat (and this in a city with a RESTAURANT called Duckfat!) and it was still the MOST delicious thing that has ever come out of my kitchen. I'm heating leftovers for breakfast as we speak. I have a lot of leftovers because my husband refuses to eat beans. MORE FOR ME.

TRANSITION

Have you all seen Holiday? The third-best-well-known Katharine Hepburn/Cary Grant team-up is less aggressively brilliant than their most famous outing, The Philadelphia Story, and less bonkers than the almost exhausting Bringing up Baby.  It's absolutely wonderful.

First of all, this poster is quite misleading! Million dollars aside… one of the most fun things about this movie is that, against type, Cary Grant is playing something close to what he actually was - a working-class guy. (A working class guy who can do back-handsprings, which former acrobat Grant actually did!) He's worked his way up with a flair for business, and is on the verge of making that promised million, but Johnny Case is not the cultured man-about-town that we're so used to seeing Grant excel at. When we meet him, he's arriving at his fiancé's house for the first time. He assumes that she's a maid in the giant mansion, and is both delighted and weirded out when he realizes that she's a daughter of a household with a full staff and an elevator. 

It's a very small story, really - a couple gets engaged and then finds out if they actually like each other. But there are so many layers, mainly expressed through the diverse characters. Besides Grant, you've got Edward Everett Horton as his best friend, a middle-class professor (it's quite fun to see Horton in a non-bumbling role!). Lew Ayres is completely heartbreaking as the baby brother of the millionaire family, who stumbles about in a drunken stupor to avoid his reality as a disappointment to his authoritarian father. And then, of course, there's Katharine Hepburn as the black sheep of the family. 

It's funny to look back on, given that Hepburn is the Meryl Streep of Hollywood's golden age, but in 1938 she was still famously considered "box office poison." The label would not be rescinded until 1940's The Philadelphia Story, where she sent up her icy, snobbish persona to great effect. Hepburn had, of course, an undeniable personality that stamped itself on every role she played. Her authoritative bearing, her exaggerated transatlantic accent, her high cheekbones - she was arrogant! Many people found it hard to swallow. In retrospect, she is a force of nature. 

She struggled to escape the inescapable. In 1937's Stage Door, she played a rich girl who wants to act and assumes it's easy. It's an unlikeable role, not helped by the fact that in the end she achieves her goal through the death of the movie's sweetest character! In 1938, the same year as Holiday, she played against type in Bringing Up Baby, which is now seen as a perfect example of screwball comedy. It was a huge critical and commercial failure at the time. Personally, it's not one of my favorites - Hepburn is brilliant, but I find her chattering character exhausting! 

So she had tried two extremes - playing her persona to the hilt, and tossing it aside completely. In Holiday she did something subtler. Her character is to the manor born, but dissatisfied with her privilege. She's a prisoner in a golden cage. It could come off as "poor little rich girl" but instead it works - maybe because Hepburn felt herself to be in a similar trap.

In 1938, America was still feeling the effects of the Great Depression, which wouldn't entirely fade until war production ramped up a few years later. It was perhaps a daring choice to make a movie about unhappy rich people. Not that there weren't movies about the rich - the depression years were filled with escapist fantasies (several of the Fred and Ginger movies come to mind). Stranger, though, was a movie that posited that a poor man was in fact happier and better than a rich one, and that money would not buy happiness. Audiences without enough to eat, who would presumably identify with Cary Grant and his friends, were asked also to feel sympathy for Lew Ayres and Katharine Hepburn, who had an elevator in their home but no love, no joy. It's a nice grey scale of characterization that gives depth to what could be a lightweight comedy (though we still get the cartoonishly avaricious rich in the persons of Grant's fiancé and her father).

To a modern viewer, it works. But although the film was critically lauded, it didn't make money - contemporaries still didn't like Hepburn. Her next professional move was to leave RKO and Hollywood to star in Broadway in the play The Philadelphia Story, written especially for her. She didn't make another movie until she starred in the movie adaptation of that play, two years later. The rest is history.

A few notes: 

Lew Ayres, most well-known from All Quiet on the Western Front, is completely heartbreaking in this film as the depressed, drunken brother who doesn't have the willpower to escape his misery. When World War II broke out a few years after Holiday, Ayres registered as a conscientious objector - his work on All Quiet had exposed him to the horrors of war. He served as a medic in the Pacific theater, but public opinion was vicious. His career was irreparably damaged. 

Fun fact to offset this horrible story: He was briefly married to Ginger Rogers!

Holiday was directed by George Cukor, a giant of classic Hollywood, who was one of Katharine Hepburn's champions. By 1938, Cukor had already directed her in Little Women and Sylvia Scarlett (the latter with Cary Grant). He would go on to helm many of her collaborations with Spencer Tracy, as well as that little tour de force, The Philadelphia Story. Cukor was famous for being great with actors, particularly women. He should get a lot of credit for continuing to champion Hepburn when most of Hollywood had turned away. He deserves his own article!

I feel like I've mentioned The Philadelphia Story more than Holiday in this essay! It's hard to get away from it when writing about Katharine Hepburn, and especially her collaborations with Cary Grant. Its importance in film history aside, it's a perfect movie that I'll write about one day when I'm feeling brave. 

A last note: Cary Grant's Johnny Case seals a business deal over the course of the movie that nets him a tidy sum. He decides to retire on the profits, because he'd rather enjoy life as a young man and go back to work when he's old. He is 30. I will just say that his decision reads very differently to me, also 30, than it did when I first saw this movie a decade ago. Also, this sort of undercuts the movie's thesis that money can't buy happiness. Guess what - it does!! It's WORKING that stinks, duh.

Despite this movie being called Holiday (and my writing about it in December) it's not a Christmas movie (although it does take place over the New Year). The holiday of the title refers to Johnny's dream of a life on holiday. Nevertheless, it's wonderful holiday viewing! It's heartwarming, funny, and you get to see Cary Grant do acrobatics (and, at one point, a routine where Hepburn somersaults off his shoulders from standing height. It's very impressive!). What more do you need?