The New Pictures

Holiday (Columbia) has had a career as noteworthy as any U. S. play in the last decade. Written by Philip Barry and produced on the Manhattan stage in 1928, it played to crowded houses throughout that pre-Depression season, set the style for a hundred-odd comedies of manners that followed it. Two years later, the first screen version, with Ann Harding, Mary Astorand the late Robert Ames in the leading roles, indicated amazingly that in talking pictures the cinema industry had found a medium which could rival the stage in its appeal to civilized, adult audiences. Now in its third edition, Holiday proves capable of providing one more shock.

Theme of Holiday is the dilemma of a young man forced to choose between marrying an heiress, who is ambitious to have him take a profitable job in her father's bank, and his own desire to stop making money and take a holiday to find out what life is all about. Johnny Case solves his problem neatly by leaving his fiancee, Julia, to rusticate in the Seton mansion, eloping with her older sister, Linda, who shares his disdain for her family bankroll. If, even in 1928, it was a little difficult to take seriously the plight of a hero and heroine whose chief problem was the prospect of having too much money, it would seem impossible to do so ten years later. Surprise of the third edition of Holiday is that it surmounts this apparent handicap without trying and emerges, thanks to Screenwriters Donald Ogden Stewart and Sidney Buchman, Director George Cukor and a cast brilliantly headed by Katharine Hepburn, as superior to both its high-grade predecessors.

In Holiday, Playwright Barry was, it now appears, touching a more delicate nerve centre than anyone could have guessed before Depression. Consequently, all Screenwriter Stewart had to do to make it look as though the play had been written yesterday was to underscore its already plotted class-angles. Thus, Julia Seton's father becomes an anti-New Deal tory, who regards his prospective son-in-law's distrust of rugged individualistic money-grubbing as dangerously unAmerican. Johnny Case (Gary Grant) becomes the more ingratiating when his ambition to take a sabbatical is presented as evidence of liberal leanings. Linda relates, as her most embarrassing moment, being arrested for helping to lead a strike against a company in which Seton Sr. is a director. When she has to correct her father for failing to catch her sister's nance's name, she says: "It's Case, not Chase, father--too bad, Chase had such a pleasant banking sound."

By her performance as Linda, Katharine Hepburn seems highly likely to refute the argument of New York's Independent Theatre Owners Association, who claimed a month ago that her box-office appeal was practically nil. Highly responsive to the cajolings of pudgy, moon-faced Director Cukor, she gives her liveliest performance since appearing in his Little Women-Restoring Cinemactress Hepburn's prestige is not the only coup Columbia will score if Holiday proves a box-office hit for the third time. The company acquired the script for practically nothing, by paying RKO $80,000 for a batch of shelved stories which also turned out to include its current hit, The Awful Truth. As an adapter, Screenwriter Stewart was an obvious, as well as fortunate, selection. One of Playwright Barry's best friends, he started a fashion since copied by Critic Alexander Woollcott, Playwright George S. Kaufman and Novelist John O'Hara by acting in the stage production of Holiday. In this version, as in the first cinema edition, the Stewart role--that of the hero's amiably light-headed crony--is played with whimsicality a shade less grim than usual by Edward Everett Horton. Omitting his own classic monologue on "How I Invented the Bottle," Screenwriter Stewart has substituted as the role's piece de resistance a lightly Leftish Punch & Judy show.

Josette (Twentieth Century-Fox) will leave undecided the rumor current for some time that Simone Simon can sing. When trying she produces noises which are not unpleasing but remain unintelligible because she never lets articulation interfere with her famed pout. From time to time, it appears that Robert Young, borrowed from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, will be permitted to get the girl, thus beating out his rival, Don Ameche, on his home lot. This would, however, constitute a serious breach of cinema convention and does not occur. Josette further manifests its veneration for tradition in nothing more clearly than its plot, which is one of mistaken identity: two brothers trying to save their father from the clutches of a cigaret girl, encountering the wrong girl when their father has left town with the siren. Fortunately, nobody utters the half-dozen words of explanation which would have immediately stopped the fuss. Having saved their father from the girl, Ameche and Young alternate in saving the girl from each other. Josette is not for the lorgnette trade, but its general nimbleness, bright lines and pleasant tunes by Gordon and Revel give it a reasonably high entertainment quotient.

Gold Diggers in Paris (Warner Bros.). In four pictures since 1929 Warner Brothers have expounded the theory that rich playboys are so plentiful and so generous that any reasonably attractive young woman can make a good living by dining with them occasionally. Nothing could make this notion seem plausible, but in the current version of the Gold Diggers saga, Producer Hal Wallis, faced with the additional handicap of Rudy Vallee as a leading man, has handled it as amiably and inventively as possible. Crooner Vallee's frozen grin and somnambulant gestures are ill-calculated to enhance the picture's pace, but its personnel is otherwise well chosen. Noteworthy are Singer Rosemary Lane; a chorus smaller but even more adept than usual; and an extraordinary "Schnickelfritz Band" (TIME, Sept. 6) which performs songs like Colonel Corn and Tiger Rag on a collection of instruments ranging from ocarinas to tire irons.

Plots of Gold Diggers musicomedies, with rules as rigid as those of a Bach fugue, admit few variations but, as its title suggests, the current spoke in the cycle introduces at least a daring shift of locale. Concerned with the efforts of a Parisian impresario.(Hugh Herbert) to import an American ballet to perform at the Paris Exposition, it reaches its peak when he discovers, in mid-Atlantic, that what he has actually imported is the swing chorus of Broadway's Club Balle.

Funniest sequence: the abject terror of the Balle Club's ventriloquist cigaret girl --who has frightened the impresario by having her Great Dane give him a talking to--when the dog starts answering back without her assistance.

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