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Breaking Away: Holiday (1939)
Review Copyright Roger Zotti, 2002
Because it serves as a refuge from the lifeless materialism of her father, her sisters, and their relatives and friends, Katharine Hepburn's Linda Seton spends her happiest moment in her childhood playroom.
It's there that the film's major confrontation takes place. Linda's father, wonderfully played by Henry Kolker, tells Linda he doesn't understand "what special virtues this room has..."
Linda quickly responds: "No, you can't...But this room's my home...There's something here that I understand and understands me. Maybe it's mother"
Linda believes her late mother's spirit was crushed and her death quickened by the joyless Seton way of life.
So when her father commands her to "take a trip somewhere...You cause nothing but grief," she agrees. "I've been dying to get out of her for years," she says. "I can't stand it here. It's doing terrible things to me." Before she leaves she asks Ned, her alcoholic brother, to accompany her. But Ned, like their mother, is a victim of Seton wealth and overwhelming snobbishness. He admires Linda's courage to break away. But he has been dominated by his father and doesn't possess the resolve to follow her.
Lew Ayres' enlightened turn as Ned speaks volumes about a young man who has had the joy of life squeezed out of him by his family.
Directed by George Cukor, Holiday is about two wealthy sisters, one spoiled, the other idealistic and charmingly rebellious. Julia is the spoiled one; Linda, we know, the charmingly rebellious one. Julia is engaged to Cary Grant's Johnny Case. It's through his eyes we learn about the Seton family.
Like Johnny, Linda, a nonconformist, subscribes wholeheartedly to Johnny's philosophy of life, a philosophy that makes no sense to Julia and her father. "I'm afraid I'm not as anxious as I might be for the things most people work toward. I don't want too much money," he tells Mr. Seton. His plan to make a "few thousand early in the game" and then quit for as long as the "money lasts and try to find out who I am and what goes on...when I'm young and feel good all the time."
The talented cast, Donald Ogden Stewart and Sidney Buchman's screenplay, and Cukor's direction make Holiday a literate, entertaining film that stands the test of time with ease.
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