Holiday · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man turns a handspring in a room full of toys, four floors above the party he is supposed to be attending. Cary Grant does the tumbling himself; he came up through the Bob Pender knockabout troupe in Britain, and the acrobatics in Holiday are the real thing. Downstairs in the Seton reception rooms, everyone is standing. Cukor stages them frontally, stiffly, at a polite distance from one another. The film never says that the rich are embalmed. It just poses them that way.

Deleuze has a name for that kind of posing. Borrowing from Brecht, he calls it the gest: an attitude or bearing that exposes a social relation the dialogue is too well-mannered to state. He develops the idea mostly for postwar directors whose characters have run out of useful things to do, which makes it an odd tool to carry into a 1938 Columbia comedy. Carry it anyway. It names precisely what Cukor invented here. In the playroom, actors sit on the floor, lie across furniture, move without motivation. Downstairs they hold their positions like furniture. The critique is in the blocking, and the blocking gets there before a single line of Philip Barry's dialogue does.

That is already an argument for the lens. Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness did more than any book to establish these comedies as philosophy, and it leaves Holiday out: Johnny and Linda have no marriage to remake, and remarriage is Cavell's engine. Deleuze needs no marriage. He needs a milieu and a body inside it, and Holiday has one of the most thoroughly designed milieus in American film.

Stephen Goosson and Lionel Banks's mansion took the picture's only Oscar nomination, correctly. It is built vertically as a moral diagram: monumental entrance hall and staircase, an elevator, floors of increasing formality and decreasing life, and at the top the playroom, preserved from the Seton children's youth. Deleuze would call this an encompasser, a situation large enough to demand an act from anyone inside it. The classical action-image runs on that demand: a global situation presses until someone acts decisively and changes it. Cukor stages the whole film as ascents and descents inside that pressure.

The house also marks people, which is Deleuze's imprint, the bond by which a milieu and a character stamp each other. Linda and Ned are the two Setons who never got out of the playroom, one still fighting, one no longer. Robert Kalloch dresses Linda in clothes consistently less finished than her sister's and the film never mentions it. Lew Ayres plays Ned lucid, funny, entirely without illusions about his own surrender, and Ned stays. His staying is the price the film insists on paying for Linda's departure.

Then something quietly strange happens to the form. The decisive act arrives, and it does not transform the situation. Johnny goes out the front door; Linda follows. Edward Seton keeps his bank, Ned keeps drinking, the house closes behind them unchanged. The large form promises that a real act reshapes the world that produced it. Holiday delivers an act that extracts two people and leaves the encompasser standing.

It can end that way because its energy was never in action. Barry's dramaturgy is Shavian: characters articulate positions and the positions collide. Deleuze calls an image that transposes action into discourse a reflection-image, and at its limit a discourse-image, one that poses a problem it cannot solve. The problem here is what money is for. Edward cannot imagine wealth as anything but a quantity to be increased. Johnny wants only enough to buy time, which the family reads as an insult rather than an ambition. And notice that Doris Nolan's Julia is not a villain; the film's toughness depends on her sincerity. Without a villain there is no force to meet force, nothing to defeat. There is only something to leave.

The one place the cutting accelerates is New Year's Eve, and it earns it: the formal party descending the staircase below, intercut with the small refuge above. The film breathes there, wide public space and then one taut line of feeling, back and forth. Deleuze traces this convergent parallel montage to Griffith, who alternated rich and poor until the alternation itself carried the meaning. Cukor had rehearsed the shape in Dinner at Eight (1933), tracking an ensemble through the rooms and landings of one stratified house on the night of a single event, staircase descent held back as the punchline. The finer debt is Franz Planer's. On Liebelei (1933) for Ophüls he had already lit intimacy in a small upper room against a grand ritual below, low key, practical sources, an off-axis key that leaves half a face in shadow. In Holiday he lets Hepburn go partly dark in the scenes where Linda is talking herself out of hope. That is the affection-image at its most precise node, the potisign: a face at a threshold, small movements gathering toward something not yet done. Hepburn plays intelligence as a burden rather than a weapon, and the shift from brittle wit to open distress arrives without a visible seam.

Almost everything else Cukor does is a refusal to cut. The playroom conversations run in sustained two- and three-shots and let Barry set the rhythm, which is Bazin's preferred cinema arrived at a decade early by way of Broadway rather than any theory of realism. The faster Eastman emulsions of the mid-thirties go into clean modelling of faces in large rooms, not the aggressive deep focus Toland would push three years later. The method comes straight out of A Bill of Divorcement (1932): rehearse the performance, then shoot it long, with a camera that declines to editorialize. Barry's discussion architecture had reached the screen in The Animal Kingdom (1932), the money-woman and the life-woman argued out in drawing-room talk with the camera holding on two people negotiating a moral position. The 1930 Pathé version handed over Edward Everett Horton's Nick Potter intact, tempo and readings and all, plus the playroom-as-sanctuary that 1938 expands into a full vertical diagram. And Sylvia Scarlett (1935) is where Cukor found the music-hall tumbler under the leading man. Holiday spends him as punctuation instead of gag.

What it did to narrative is easy to state and was hard to do. We know within twenty minutes which sister Johnny should marry; the remaining hour is everyone else catching up. Suspense stops being about outcome and becomes about cost. Will Linda betray her sister? Will Ned find the nerve? American comedy discovered here that it could be about renunciation, that its funniest character could be its saddest, and that a film could end with two people running away without ever quite saying they were in love.

The bill came due in the good way. The Philadelphia Story (1940) does not exist in that configuration without this picture proving the combination. Grant's fusion of the acrobat and the grown man runs on into Only Angels Have Wings, His Girl Friday, Notorious. The preserved childhood room in a frozen wealthy household became a recurring American figure; critics reach for The Royal Tenenbaums, though affinity is the honest word there, not lineage.

So watch the floors. Watch who stands and who sits, and how far apart. Then, when the door closes on Johnny and Linda, ask what Tuesday looks like for Ned. The film knows. It just won't make that funny.