Holiday is a homey and hilarious yet sharply class-conscious comedy romance about two souls bound together accidentally. After a brief vacation, up-and-coming but let-loose businessman Johnny Cash (Cary Grant) returns to his NYC apartment to tell old roommates/friends of big news: he’s getting engaged to Julia Seton (Doris Nolan) after they met and fell in love weeks earlier and thus is moving. Though friends Professor Nick Potter (Edward Everett Horton) and his wife Susan (Jean Dixon) are hesitant, given Johnny’s free-spirited nature, they wish him luck as he departs to meet her family. Upon stepping through a kitchen that’s a front for a deeper in-building city manor, Cash quickly realizes Julia’s the daughter of a millionaire. He meets Julia’s house servants, her very WASP-traditional father, Edward Seton (Henry Kolker), her alcoholic brother Ned (Lew Ayres), and—most importantly—Julia’s less money-driven sister, Linda (Katharine Hepburn). While initially all in on marriage, as Julia and Edward begin forcing upper-class norms, values, and living-working schedules, Johnny becomes conflicted: his original plans of making enough money to “retire young, work old” to discover himself will surely dissolve upon marrying. He must determine whether financial security or personal freedom is more critical. Still, fortunately, with Linda secretly falling madly for Johnny, whichever way he goes, he’s got a future wife at his side. Money can be everything or nothing in this world, even with love.

Holiday is a comedic classic. Johnny and Linda’s parallel charm—Johnny literally backflips from time to time, and Linda spent her childhood on a trapeze bar—and spontaneous personalities, Holiday’s upper-class confrontations created by Linda and Julia’s wealthy father, and the lively script that pushes spring in every spoken word are all budding examples of how director George Cukor and crew elevate this film well past its predictable narrative. Humans are involving creatures, so swooping others under ideologies and lifestyles they see as best—especially from parents to kids—is relatively normal. Thus, Linda feels trapped by her father and the family’s upper-class traditional values: “A reverence for riches. Look out for that, Johnny,” Linda explains after describing how her family is rich from stealing railroad bonds generations before. She spends the film resenting her father’s stuck-up ways, with his dinner parties where women devote themselves to their male counterparts and the ironing board-hard social norms get forced upon her at every social occasion. Plus, it births a dull life: “You know the snow is letting up more this week,” Edward explains to Johnny for the second time in the film, his sole talking subject beyond gaining power and money and maintaining the family’s status. While Johnny and Julia anoint first, Linda matches Johnny’s freethinking persona much more—a dynamic that reinforces such class disputes’ impact throughout. Their eventual romance may be predictable, but the lead-up to their film-ending togetherness is funnily insightful. Add in a delightfully skippy score, polished sets, organically zippy interactions all around, and even more themes over U.S. society at large pre-World War II, and Holiday is a fleshed-out comedy about the nuisances of a sexist and racist system self-invented and obtained through cruelty to the masses—upper-class luxuries!—and why money shouldn’t trump love.

Thus, while Julia and Johnny Cash couldn’t ever happen—especially as Julia reveals herself to be more like her dull, greedy dad—Linda Cash will live happily ever after with Johnny as they explore the world, each other, and themselves. For Grant or Hepburn fans, old cinema fans, smart comedy fans, and those looking for something lighthearted but not stupid, Holiday’s worth a long weekend watch.

Screens Tuesday, 2/18, 7:00 pm @ Coolidge Corner Theatre
Part of the ongoing repertory series: Cary Grant