La morte in vacanza

"Death Takes a Holiday" was based on a play, and it's interesting that another playwright was called upon to adapt it for the screen. The original piece by Alberto Casella feels almost Pirandellian, in that it elevates every day things into a philosophical realm. Maxwell Anderson's respect for the original text shows in his elegant treatment of the material. The film is greatly enhanced by Mitchell Leisen's direction.

The people behind this 1934 film gathered an interesting cast to play Mr. Casella's characters. The idea of making death a human being was a novel idea. When the Grim Reaper becomes real in the person of Prince Sirki, it opened the possibilities for how he looked at life from this new perspective.

The idea of bringing Prince Sirki into the Duke Lambert's palatial home was the right setting, for it gives the movie an elegance that only in that context could be achieved. It's clear that Prince Sirki falls for the beautiful Grazia instantly. Grazia is almost engaged to Corrado, the Duke's son.

It's a joy to see these aristocrats at play when they encounter the figure of the prince. Only the Duke knows about him and is always by the prince's side in order to help him grasp the earthly nuances that supposedly, Sirki knows nothing about.

The ensemble performances Mr. Leisen achieved from his cast shows on the finished product we see. Fredric March makes an elegant presence as Sirki. The beautiful Evelyn Venable is perfect as Grazia. Guy Standing makes the most of his Duke Lambert. Henry Travers, Kent Taylor, Gail Patrick and Katherine Alexancer are seen in minor parts.

How can anyone compare this elegant production with the recent remake of this film? It is a puzzle to this observer, at best.

I have watched this movie many times over the years and I continue to love it, even more than the remake `Meet Joe Black' with Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins (On it's own a great movie with wonderful actors).

However, In this original movie, `Death Takes A Holiday' the title role is played by the incredibly talented Fredric March, as he portrays an intensely charismatic Death/Prince Sirki. Here you will find an innocent, charming stranger who is learning from his host and the guests surrounding him yet is also imparting his own knowledge and wisdom.

The path Death has taken is a journey in which all of us partake. What makes us human? What brings us joy and happiness in this lifetime? All that Death has ever seen of our world is fear as he greets those who enter his world. So, he enters our world to see and feel what more there is to our existence. In fact, we could learn a great deal from the character Death, for he reminds us of that which we take for granted in this life, and is denied to him as Death.

`Death Takes A Holiday' may seem dark and forbidding but it is filled with hope that is encouraging; and love which should follow us past this life and into the next.

First of all, the director of this film, Mitchell Leisen is one of the most underrated talents of 30's and 40's. He's acquired something of a bad reputation because of pretty vicious remarks made about him by Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder when talking about the films he directed from their scripts in the days before they were allowed to direct their *own* scripts. However, he doesn't deserve the derision. He's made some fluff films, for sure, but he's a consistently entertaining filmmaker who, more often than not, really delivers.

Anyway, Death Takes a Holiday is sort of his "art film" and it has a lot of great things in it. Fredric March's performance as Death is wonderful, the atmosphere is thick, the humor works, the scene setting is smart and romantic, and the opening titles are fun and weird, immediately presenting the film as something that's going to be a little unusual.

The problem with the film lies in Fredric March's romance with Evelyn Venable. The idea of Death falling in love with a human is great, but it's just not convincing here, mostly due to Venabale turning in a wooden performance that almost suggests she might be hypnotized. Also, the dialogue between them, particularly in the closing scene, is melodramatic and pseudo poetic beyond belief. You almost want to laugh at it.

It's a shame this most important aspect of the movie was handled so badly because just about everything else in film is great, particularly the interaction between Fredric March and just about everyone else in film who isn't Evelyn Venable. All of the good stuff just bursts with intruiging ideas.

And for that I would recommend the film to all potential viewers. The film is not without it's problems, but the good stuff is just good enough for me to say that the proverbial glass is definitely half full.

Adapted by Walter Ferris, Maxwell Anderson and Gladys Lehman from Alberto Cassella's 1929 play La Morte in Vacanze, Death Takes a Holiday features Fredric March as the titular Grim Reaper. Death becomes curious about why he is so feared. He wants to understand humankind better. So through some unspecified means he becomes corporeal for a three-day period, beginning and ending at midnight. He chooses to take the form of a Prince Sirki, recently deceased, and takes his holiday at the palatial Italian villa of Duke Lambert (Guy Standing). Will he discover what makes humans tick in only three days? This is a highly successful, unusual film. It has strong touches of horror, even though it's more of an art-house drama cum romance flick. It's also frequently philosophical, and director Mitchell Leisen easily sustains dramatic tension for close to 90-minutes despite the fact that this was only his second feature, and a very "talky" one at that, which takes place primarily in a single setting (the play only had one set, but the film adds a couple other scenes).

Of course March's performance is crucial to making the film work. He has the difficult task of playing both a personification of a menacing supernatural force and a chimerical human trying to "act natural" and slightly failing. That March plays the role so impeccably is made all the more fascinating in light of the fact that he was filming All of Me (1934) at the same time. He borrowed a woman's bicycle (his wife Florence Elridge's) to enable him to quickly travel from one set to the other on the Paramount studio lot. March has said that Death/Prince Sirki was one of his favorite roles, and he willingly reprised it both on radio for Lux Radio Theater in March of 1937 and on stage, in a production by Baltimore City College in May of 1938.

As impressive as March is, he is initially upstaged by the fantastic special effects. We first see Death as simply a shadow. Later, March appears in more traditional Grim Reaper garb, which is eerily transparent and surprisingly modern in design. Leisen demanded that the transparency effect be achieved in-camera rather than a later manipulation during the film processing stage. So Gordon Jennings employed the same technique that made The Invisible Man (1933) invisible. Parts of the set were recreated in black velvet. These were reflected in a partially transparent mirror, which was then superimposed over March (you can see a related effect "live" in the ballroom scene of Walt Disney World's The Haunted Mansion ride). March's elaborate cloaks were composed of layers of chiffon in dark hues from gray to black. Jennings also installed tiny lights under March's "hood" to light up his skull make-up.

The rest of the cast is excellent, too, if maybe a bit too sprawling for the film's length. But there needs to be a larger number of characters, as a hinge of the film is that three different women fall in love with Prince Sirki during his brief visit, one of them eventually being discouraged by his bizarre behavior, the other by being able to see his "true self". Sirki ends up falling in love with Grazia (Evelyn Venable, in her second role after 1933's Cradle Song), who is supposedly the fiancée of Corrado (Kent Taylor), but with him, she is oddly aloof. Despite the romance between Death/Sirki and Grazia, March and Venable never kiss in the film, as Venable's father had a clause written into her contract forbidding it.

Leisen creates a thick, almost creepy atmosphere for much of the film (although it's strongest when Duke Lambert first encounters Death), which gives it much of its horror overtones. For me, the romance aspect has a slight (appropriate) morbidity because of this, and it's questionable whether the film should even be considered a romance. The set design is also fantastic--the villa is breathtaking; it's too bad Leisen couldn't show it off more.

The constant tension invoked by Death/Sirki always being on the brink of "blowing his cover" keeps the viewer on the edge of their seat more often than one might expect. But Death Takes a Holiday is most fascinating when it waxes philosophical. Because death is on holiday, numerous accidents occur that people just walk away from (this was an intriguing and logical aspect that was absent from the 1998 remake, Meet Joe Black). This makes the newspapers, and Death finds it particularly ironic that humans seem to almost lament that war is not working correctly. He promises to the unwitting that humankind will soon again be able to blow each other up. Baron Cesarea (Henry Travers, who also played Dr. Cranley in The Invisible Man) offers that there are three "games" in life--money, war and love, and Death/Sirki ends up agreeing. Love finally gives him the answer of why humankind fears him so, and finally shows why life is not futile or simply a frittering away of time while people wait for him to arrive in his natural guise. The ending of the film was quite controversial, and suggests that love can even surmount death; it almost seems to say that possessing love, death might not be such a bad thing after all.

Many contemporary viewers will find the dialogue here hard going, for the film shows its stage origins; the heightened rhetoric and often extended speeches that have the characters speaking at, rather than to one another, create a rather wooden effect on the screen. This film could not have come from any studio other than Paramount during the 1930s: the only studio that produced what might be called today art films, including this one. From Mae West, W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers; to the Lubitsch musicals with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette Macdonald and his European-like sophisticated romantic comedies; to an occasional deMille spectacular; Paramount provided the most diversified output of the early studio era. Yet,with the exception of the occasional action costume drama, most Paramount films seem to have been made on a relatively low budget, with only one or two sets, including this film. However, since set design was always done with some elegance, economy is not as noticeable as with the Warner films. (Where a devotee has seen the same apartment set so often that s/he feels right at home).I notice that most IMDB reviewers give positive comments. Perhaps I was just not ready for this one last night (I recall having enjoyed it more years ago); but for me the components never jelled so as to provide a consistent development of plot or characterizations.