The spectacle of Hepburn and Cary Grant performing a circus act together in Holiday, breathtaking backward flips and somersaults, is truly the transmogri­fication of eros into action, acrobatics as mutual turn-on.

This second adaptation of a Philip Barry play plugs into the screwball com­edy dynamic that sexual reversal equals a larger freedom. The equalization of difficulties in these films is part of a re­invented world in which male author­ity or sexual imperialism is reduced or in abeyance while the feminine spirit is either dominant or equal. Hepburn is again out of step with her world, as in in Bringing Up Baby, but here she’s a slightly more thoughtful rebel: she’s rich and she hates it, hence her retreat into a carefree refuge filled with the games and toys of childhood. Johnny Case (Cary Grant) is the self-made man who’s en­gaged to a rich girl he’s only just met and whose position stuns him. His actual wish is to just take a year-long vacation and find out who he is and what he wants. His determination to escape work and find meaning may be one reason Depression-era audiences, desperate for work, didn’t responded as warmly to this film as later audiences did. Still there’s something timeless about Hepburn’s words when she says, caustically: “You haven’t been bitten by reverence for rich­es.” In the Eden-like playroom secreted in the huge Fifth Avenue mansion, and under the auspices of the liberating Hep­burn, Grant gradually embraces the spirit of foolishness and freedom that she represents and in so doing defects from the business world (represented by his prospective father in law).

Cukor’s mastery of this ensemble is su­perlative, a balancing act of close-ups, and ensemble shots, the sweet and the sad, the angry (Hepburn, sister Doris Nolan) and the whimsical (sidekicks Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon); the morose (al­coholic brother Lew Ayres) and of course the stuffy (father Henry Kolker, Henry Daniell) – and the antic in the attic.

Molly Haskell