The divide between people who claim to love New Year’s Eve and those who loathe it is perhaps not as wide as you’d think. Even if you strive to view the midnight countdown as a time of fresh beginnings, it’s human to be at least slightly haunted by the specter of everything you failed to accomplish in the previous 12 months, of all the things that went wrong despite your best hopes. The best medicine for those who find New Year’s Eve depressing is to simply acknowledge it as a time of wistfulness. And for that mood, there’s a perfect movie: George Cukor’s 1938 Holiday, starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.
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Holiday is a joyous movie that nonetheless comes with a pang trailing along, like a comet’s tail. Grant plays Johnny Chase, a charming bachelor with a floppy forelock but a firm plan: He’s a stockbroker who’s been working since he was 10, and he’s saved a little money. Now he just wants to enjoy life while he’s got the verve and energy to do so. He’s not anti-work—he’s willing to go back if or when he needs to. But for now, as he puts it in an impassioned speech whose rhythms have a “Song of Myself” exuberance, “It’s always been my idea to make a few thousand early in the game and then quit for as long as it lasts, and try to find out who I am and what goes on and what about it, now, while I’m still young and feel good all the time!”
Johnny has fallen in love with New York heiress Julia Seton (Doris Nolan), who’s cool and beautiful and who seems like fun, kind of. They’ve become engaged after a whirlwind romance, and she has no idea of his hopes and plans. Her expectation is that he’ll go into finance, like her uptight father (Henry Kolker); for her, the privilege of having money is a hamster wheel she’s happy to stay on.
When Johnny pays his first visit to the Seton mansion, he meets Julia’s sister, the eccentric livewire Linda (Hepburn), who adores her sibling and grills Johnny ruthlessly about his intentions. As…
Source : time
