Comfy, Cozy Cinema 2024 - Holiday

Comfy, Cozy Cinema is a collaboration of Lisa from Boondock Ramblings and Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs.
They have a list of movies to watch for September and October. I was late to the game and not having subscribed to any streaming platforms, I probably wouldn't have been able to watch everything, anyway - but even though they had chosen "Skylark" for today, a movie I haven't even heard of, they couldn't watch it after all. So instead they watched "Bringing Up Baby" with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. Now as much as I love Cary, that's not one of my favorite movies. It's alright, but a tad too hectic for my taste.
I chose a different Grant/Hepburn movie instead, "Holiday", also from 1938.
 

From Wikipedia: The poster art copyright is believed to belong
to the distributor of the film, Columbia Pictures,
the publisher of the film or the graphic artist.

The movie begins right after two of the characters come back from a winter holiday in Lake Placid where they have fallen madly in love with one another, so madly that they want to get married as soon as possible - Johnny and Julia. We are informed about that whirlwind romance during Johnny visiting his friends, the Porters ... sorry, the Potters (that's an inside joke you'll understand if you know the movie).

There's just one little catch. Johnny has been working since he was ten after losing his father and is longing for a break to enjoy it while he is still young (Lake Placid was his first holiday ever) and Julia is a rich New York socialite who is used to status and of course money.
Unfortunately she knows about Johnny's past while she seems to have forgotten to tell him how very rich her family is. He only finds out when he gets to the address she has given him, a huge estate. Thinking she must be working there, he even goes to the back entrance!
However, Johnny is not even that concerned about Julia's money at first because he's so sure she will follow him into his dream holiday while she didn't even bother mentioning her money because she has already planned out his future like a business deal. Clearly they haven't talked very much.

So - will Julia's father go along with this prospective son-in-law? Will he say yes or no? Will it help that Johnny is working in the financial sector at the moment and the Setons happen to have a bank? Most important, will they find a common goal and will their love be strong enough?

Julia's older sister Linda is sure of it. To her, stuck in a life that makes her feel like a prisoner, living in a house like a museum, Johnny is like a fresh wind, and when he tells her about his dream of taking a holiday once he has enough money for it and go back to work when he's old, she loves the idea and is excited for Julia to have found a man who will take her away from her old life.

Ned, the youngest, forced to give up his dreams of being a musician and bound to a desk at the bank instead, thanks to the questionable honor of being the only male descendant, is more cynical about all of it. Despite having chosen alcohol as his personal escape, he is amazingly clear about the others' feelings at times.

By now you have probably already guessed that Johnny and Linda are really the main characters. Although Linda does everything to convince Julia that this is an enormous chance for her and that she and Johnny belong together, we already know how this is going to end, how this probably had to end, with or without Linda.
Two people falling in love with beauty and charm, but with very different ideas of life and not able to compromise. Mind you, Johnny gives it a short try, but Julia and her father don't want to move a step, so he decides he can't do it after all. What could a real compromise even look like, torn between total freedom and work/money?

Now (back) to two people I have mentioned only shortly, but who are not only important being Johnny's best friends, they also make for some of the funniest scenes of the movie. Sorry if I have given you the idea so far that this is just a sad movie because it isn't, but it's also no pure screwball comedy.
The Porters ... uhm, Potters both teach at university. They are witty and uncoventional, and from when they enter the "museum" for the engagement announcement party on New Year's Eve (held against Linda's wishes as she had asked to be allowed to organize a small, cozy party in the playroom, the only room in the house that actually looks lived in and where a few of the most important scenes are set), they seem to be very unsure about the future of this relationship. They really just want the best for their friend.

This movie starts out so light and happy and optimistic for the young couple. Coming home from a holiday, freshly in love, nothing can go wrong.
Then they start to find out about each other's plans for the future, plans that don't match one bit.
Linda, on the other hand, is torn between the love for her sister and the wish to escape that sort of life. It made me wonder a little how she and Julia seemed to be getting along so well in the first place despite being so different.

My heart breaks a bit for Ned. He's already too far gone and doesn't have the courage to even try and escape even when offered a hand. I can just see him sitting at that desk in the bank, drinking his life away bit by bit.

Despite the developments, however, Johnny has a lightness through most of the movie and sometimes seems childlike which is pretty amazing given he has done nothing but work for so many years already.
I think it's what attracts Linda - I'm sure by now you have guessed the ending - who is trying to conjure up her own happier childhood in the playroom her mother insisted on having in the house (it makes you wonder what her mother was like and if her death made the family fall apart like that). Does she fall in love with Johnny as a person or with the idea of Johnny? I'm desperate for happy endings, at least in movies, and hope it's the first one. They sail off into the sunset together and live happily ever after. Not sure if they will ever be able to come back to see the family (poor Ned) because something tells me Daddy Seton and Julia are not too happy about this, but at least they have their friends by their side.

Did I sound as if I don't like the movie? Nothing could be more wrong. I love it and rewatch it regularly. Maybe it's Cary Grant's optimism and his tumbling (which he did himself, after all he started out touring with a troupe of acrobatic dancers), maybe it's that even the sad parts are not just sad and that there's hope, maybe it's that I didn't find any of the main characters really annoying, not even Julia and her father, or that I loved the Potters.
Maybe I shouldn't even try to find out and just keep loving it.

The movie was based on a Broadway play, by the way, and it is a remake of a movie from 1930 (which I just saw is on YouTube, so take a guess what I'll be watching next!).