Holiday (1938), or How Living to Work and Make Money Cannot by Happiness

Abstract

In 1938 was released the second big screen version of Philip Barry’s play “Holiday: a comedy in three acts”, written in 1928, about money and happiness only a year before the crash of 1929. Ten years later, Donald Ogden Stewart, Philip Barry’s partner at Yale and the inspiration for the Professor Nick Potter character, wrote the script to take the play brought to the big screen by George Cukor.
Two years before filming the movie, in 1936, Ogden became Chairman of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, considered during the 1947 HUAC’s hearings as a fellow traveler. At the script Professor Nick (Edward Everett Horton) at the end of the story is forced to travel to Europe in a hurry for no apparent reason. Holiday (1938) becomes a story about power, money and ideals, where young Johnny Case (Cary Grant) must choose between happiness and accumulate great wealth, offering a critical insight about the idea of "to live to work", and questioning the need to accumulate assets and wealth when there's no time to enjoy and spend.