Holiday (1938) is a very frustrating movie.

Is this where the club meets?

My boyfriend was visiting me earlier this month and we ended up watching Holiday, the George Cukor movie from 1938 with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant as the leads. We had watched it together before, and while I was watching it with him this time I was thinking that this is a movie that sort of drives me crazy in the same way The Philadelphia Story drives me crazy, and then he mentioned to me that they’re written by the same guy, Philip Barry… What was going on with that guy?¹

Granted, The Philadelphia Story’s highs are higher and its lows are lower, but both of the movies leave me with a sense that I’m maybe insane, that I’m watching something plainly charming, to other people, and all I can think is, everybody in this movie’s crazy. They both are movies overburdened with a message that’s also somehow impossible to figure out, dripping with father problems, and the charisma of the stars feels like the struggle of the living against the machine. People are constantly launching into s…