The Devil's Holiday

Yesterday night I watched 'The Devil's Holiday'. It says a lot about the quality of the film that this morning I am struggling to remember enough of it to jot down a few brief impressions. Nancy Carroll definitely looks nice and plays (mostly) well, at least she is putting in a lot of effort. Hobart Bosworth (who plays the father of the man she marries) and James Kirkwood (the older brother) are likewise doing well. I found Phillip Holmes (as Carroll's husband) annoying: He is overacting and all in all unconvincing. The storyline is alright, but director Edmund Goulding wastes several chances for making more of the plot and giving it some wit and sparkle. The dialogues are somwhere between uninspired and awful - awful especially toward the end of the film, which has an irritating sickly-sentimental quality that I found offputting. All in all nothing memorable, I am afraid.

Hallie Hobart (Nancy Carroll), veteran party girl, works the conventions in the Big City and makes money from the agents who sic her on to prospective buyers - in this case, for farm equipment. Into her clutches falls David Stone (Philips Holmes), fresh from a fall off a turnip truck, and Wowzers! David falls head-over-heels for her and wants to marry her. His family is loaded with money and advice, but David is hearing none of it. He marries her and brings her home to his horrified family.

What follows is hard to swallow. Suffice it to say there is much pathos, contrivance, animosity, strife and bitterness. There is also reconciliation but, as I say, this second half of the picture must be taken cum grano salis. The main reason to watch this soaper is to watch Nancy Carroll's best acting job. Prior to "The Devil's Holiday" she made several lightweight musical comedies, so her performance here is a jolt. In fact, she was nominated for an Oscar for this film but lost to Norma Shearer in "The Divorcée". 1930's audiences were probably prostrate with grief as the weepy plot unfolds, but 1930 is a long time ago.

Turgid by today's standards and pretty stagy, yet THE DEVIL'S HOLIDAY offers solid performances by Nancy Carroll as a party girl who lands a hick (Phillips Holmes), in from the wheat belt, in a scam. As Hallie, a woman who no scruples and who hates men, Carroll won an Oscar nomination in a flashy role. Holmes is also excellent as the sensitive and naive youth.

Hobart Bosworth and James Kirkwood (as the father and brother) are oddly effective in their stereotypical roles. Ned Sparks and Jed Prouty play a couple of sharpies, and Zasu Pitts has a small role as the hotel operator. Paul Lukas shows up (badly cast) as a rural doctor.

While the plot veers toward the ludicrous, the actors remain solid and convincing, no easy job.

Nancy Carroll plays a young, worldly woman who baits young men for a confidence trickster in the form of the dead-pan delivery vehicle - Ned Sparks. Her victim is the young Phillips Holmes in probably one of his better roles. He is the son of wealthy farming stock of whom the patriarch is Hobart Bosworth delivering his lines as if preaching a sermon in the quaky-voiced method so fondly used by actors of his august vintage.

Carroll and Holmes marry despite opposition from Bosworth and Holme's fiery brother - James Kirkwood. Of course the marriage is a sham, the idea was for Carroll to get a cheque for $50,000 from Bosworth to walk away. Complications ensue. Just realize that many of these pot-boilers seem to have been brewed from the same recipe,

Nancy Carroll became a very popular star in the early reign of talking pictures and perhaps had the good sense to retire at the top of her game in 1938 (she did come back to do some later work from 1948 onwards). She was a vivacious creature and an all-round talent in that she was originally a singer and dancer from the stage. She is an asset to this picture as she appears at all times to be so natural.

Phillips Holmes was a handsome leading man who started off promisingly and then never seemed to go anywhere. Tragically his life was cut short during the war in an airplane accident.

Hobart Bosworth was already 68 in 1930 when this picture was made and his style belonged to an age even further back - but it is interesting just for that very fact. He is a living link to the acting style of the last quarter of the 19th Century.

James Kirkwood was an actor who had taken up directing, but as he apparently didn't get many calls for the latter type of work, decided to revert to the former. He was around for many years - usually in bit roles as the years progressed.

Also in the cast were Paul Lukas as a forceful psychiatrist and Morton Downey as a tenor.

Edmund Goulding's morality tale stars Nancy Carroll as a pretty, gold digging manicurist who attracts the wealthy heir to a harvesting machine fortune (Phillips Holmes). After he pursues her energetically, she agrees to marry him, but when he brings her home to his family's country estate, his father (Hobart Bosworth in a plummy performance right out of 19th century melodrama) summons her to his den for a confrontation about her true motives. There, he swiftly draws out the worst in her and offers her $50,000 to end the marriage. Meanwhile, out on the staircase, the young husband falls and injures himself severely during a violent confrontation with his disapproving older brother. Nouveau riche Nancy nevertheless high tails it back to the big city to spend freely and pack for a dream trip to Paris. Trouble is, she slowly realizes she actually loves Holmes, now a semi-invalid. Can she, will she, redeem herself? It doesn't take long to find out in the perfunctorily structured plot resolution. Holmes and Carroll are more convincing here than in another pairing from around the same time ("Stolen Heaven," 1931).