O Brother, Where Art Thou?

The latest New Yorker has an essay by Caleb Crain on the effect of the Depression on culture. It's a good subject, but the piece has a strange start:

"I want to find out why I’m working,” Cary Grant tells Katharine Hepburn in “Holiday.” Grant’s character, a grocer’s son who put himself through Harvard, wants to take time off from a promising business career, and Grant makes the proposal sound at once existential and lighthearted—as if he wants to investigate not because he’s especially troubled or especially gifted but because this is the sort of thing human beings like to know, and he happens to have the means to try to find out. [...]

“Holiday” was released in 1938. It might seem nervy of Hollywood to give an audience slogging through the Great Depression a story about rich people wondering how, why, or even whether they should work, but doubts about the culture of work were then widespread.

Is Crain right? Were doubts about the culture of work widespread? I'm not sure how you'd measure that. In fact, Holiday, though considered a classic today, performed disappointingly. It's hard to know why. It could be it seemed a bit stagey. It could be that it came out during Hepburn's "box office poison" period. But some feel it's because people, especially during the Depression, weren't thrilled to see Cary Grant turn down a great opportunity just so he could find himself. Audiences loved fantasy worlds where rich people never thought about money, and they made a big hit of My Man Godfrey (referenced elsewhere in the piece) where former rich idler William Powell learns self-respect through hard work, but I can't think of that many films where people cheered someone throwing away a big chance for an existential crisis. Picking love over money was always popular, as was claiming the best things in life are free, but laziness was never in, and a plot where the lead just wants to take a break rather than take advantage of an opportunity may have been rubbing the audience's nose in it.

In any case, I'd say at the time it wasn't that "nervy" to release such a film because, in fact, it was a remake. The first film version of Holiday came out in 1930, itself a remake of a Philip Barry Broadway hit that opened in 1928, the year before the Depression struck. I guess that was a good time and place for this particular plot.

PS Later in the essay:

In Preston Sturges’s “Sullivan’s Travels” (1942), Joel McCrea plays a director who thinks he should shoot a grim social epic instead of a sequel to “Ants in Your Pants of 1939,” his recent popular movie musical. [...] The fictional “Ants in Your Pants of 1939” was no doubt a reference to the actual “Gold Diggers of 1933,” a Busby Berkeley musical that was no less pertinent to its historical moment.

1) What's with the vaunted New Yorker fact-checking department? Sullivan's Travels is a 1941 film. Also, Joel McCrea's director didn't make Ants In Your Pants of 1939, he made Ants In Your Plants Of 1939 (along with Hey Hey In The Hayloft).

2) Isn't a 1941 (much less 1942) film getting a little late to talk about Depression culture?

3) Crain is surprisingly confident the Ants title is a nod to Gold Diggers Of 1933. Why? That film was already 8 years old. Wouldn't it just as likely refer to Gold Diggers Of 1935, or Gold Diggers of 1937? Or for that matter, Broadway Melody of 1936, Broadway Melody of 1938 and Broadway Melody of 1940. Or maybe the series at Paramount--Sturges' home--The Big Broadcast of 1936, The Big Broadcast of 1937 and The Big Broadcast of 1938.