FANTASIA OBSCURA: Sometimes Even Death Needs a Little Holiday Break
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, yes, you really should take time off, because a vacation is sometimes just what the doctor ordered…
Death Takes a Holiday (1934)
(Dist.: Paramount Pictures; Dir.: Mitchell Leisen)
Death seems to permeate a lot of movies, especially genre films. Stuff, from houses to planets, gets blown up, and characters expire to drive forward either the hero or the plot. All those countless victims let you know how dangerous the villain/monster is. It’s enough to make you want to take a few days off.
And in the pre-Code days, Death did manage to get a long weekend in Italy before going back to all that mayhem and despair.
Based on the 1924 stage play La Morte in Vacanza by Alberta Casella, we find ourselves in an unidentified part of Italy where Duke Lambert (Sir Guy Standing) is having guests over during the local flower harvest. Among them are his son Corrado (Kent Taylor) and his lovely fiancée, Grazia (Evelyn Venable), who are madly in love and lucky to be alive after a harrowing close accident between their car and a donkey cart. They are among a number of folks at the villa enjoying the season and having no cares as they spend a few days in relaxation.
The villa soon has to accommodate another unexpected guest: Death himself, played by Fredric March, who after passing through and not deciding to make a pickup back on the road by the donkey cart, decides that he’s tired of just watching us doing things he can’t fully comprehend, and then fearing him when it’s their time to go.
He prevails upon Duke Lambert to spend three days at the house, in the form of Prince Sirki, promising to not take anyone with him on the condition that Death’s identity is not revealed.
While the holiday-goers at the duke’s villa are quite accommodating to the new (if a little strange) guest among them, they are not without awareness that something extraordinary is happening. One of the duke’s guests, Baron Cesarea (Henry Travers) reads from the paper about a man who walks away from throwing himself off the Eiffel Tower, which he shares with the prince over brunch.
There’s only brief tension before Death realizes he’s not been exposed, which allows him to enjoy the next few days in a montage while we see headlines of what should be fatal incidents (fires, sinkings, race-car accidents) where no fatalities occur.
(Which goes to show that absent very bad news, the papers will run with what they have…)
While there’s a lot more else the story would rather pursue, which we’ll look at shortly, there are the fascinating questions this segment of the film raises: What happens if we don’t die? Does tragedy still sadden us if the worse that could happen doesn’t, even can’t take place? When we realize that the stakes are now far lower, do we get bolder? Would we do things we might not if the ultimate penalty is no longer in place?
Cesarea brings up a little bit of this over brunch with the prince, but since two of the duke’s guests, Alda (Katharine Alexander) and Rhoda (Gail Patrick), are busy trying to start up a romance with him, the questions stay unexamined until we get Torchwood: Miracle Day in 2011.
(Also unexamined: Until the prince shows up, Alda and Rhoda look forward to sharing a bed together for the night but become rivals for the prince. Apparently, pre-Code Hollywood didn’t allow that much leeway…)
What the film does look at, instead, is Death’s attempt to understand us — why we do what we do, what drives us to pursue “our little games” as Death (who is not being proud) calls our drives.
Ultimately, he gets a clue, as his 72-hour furlough winds up, that of the three things we’re most driven by, love (or at least desire) is the one that’s most worth it. Unfortunately, Rhoda finds him a little out of whack to allow for a connection, and when Alda shows her interest, he drops some truth on her as to who he is, which she doesn’t react well to, screeching in horror and all that.
As the holiday comes to a close, the prince and Grazia have a few moments to form a connection, which leads to a finale where truths are realized, revelations are made, and Blue Oyster Cult would have been appropriate for the scene had the song been recorded 42 years earlier.
Coming as it did between World Wars, with memories of the last one just softening before fears of the new one could be fully realized, the film finds itself at an apogee point between the two in a space that gives it the luxury of asking who we are as humans and what makes us do what we do, as asked by the ultimate outsider.
Death, who can’t get past our horror at meeting him to understand us, has to take three days before returning to where he came from in order to know more about us, and in watching him go through that, we supposedly learn more about ourselves, whether it’s in the theaters the first time when the film got good notices, or in countless television plays in the decades afterwards.
It’s an eternal question, one that prompted numerous reexaminations over the years. March would play Death again when a radio version of the story was produced in 1937, which was followed up by a made-for-television version in 1971 and became the basis for the film Meet Joe Black in 1998.
Death, in addition to being both eternal and certain, is also apparently popular despite just doing its job; case in point…
NEXT TIME: “Hey, the world’s ending,” he said, “so let’s party!” Yeah, like that was going to end well.
