Intro: Evelyn Venable was born on October 18, 1913 so this week let’s take a look at her movies. The movie reviewed below gained her much attention at the time and dreamy Grazia is the role she is remembered for today among the hardest of hardcore buffs of classic Hollywood. She was perfectly cast and made the most of her chance. That this movie ever got made in the first place is hard to figure out, since it is pitched an extremely narrow market: folks of above average intelligence (i.e. half the movie-going public) that are interested in spiritual matters (whoa, that takes in only about 30% out of the half we had*).
Death
Takes a Holiday
1934 / 1:20
Tagline: “No one died! Because Death was busy making
love!”
[internet archive]
From the play by Alberto Casella (1891 - 1957), Fredric March plays the Grim Reaper and Evelyn Venable plays the Spiritual Girl.
March crashes a carefree house-party hosted by expatriate English people in Italy for their American friends. The Grim Reaper conceals his identity by dressing in the height of fashion and adopting the suave manner of a European aristocrat. He obligates his host to keep his identity a secret because he wants to plumb the mystery as to why, given the sorrows and trials of life, people fear and abhor death even more than being alone.
The Reaper tries gambling, ping pong, the ponies, boating, dancing and socializing. He finds no answer in these time-filling activities as why people cling to life. Then an elderly baron suggests love and romance. Luckily the Spiritual Girl, on the lookout for the ineffable, has not yet discovered sitting on the meditation cushion or the usual snares for the unwary called mysticism or occultism or politics.
They fall in love.
Thus, the Grim Reaper finds the answer to his question as to why people cleave to life though they piss away their precious time with mindless scrolling. For once, Hollywood does not give in to its usual nervous anticipations as to what the folks in Pottsville or Zenith will think of the ending.
The line, “Has it ever occurred to you that death may be simpler than life and infinitely more kind” provides grist for conversation during, say, a third date for a well-read but cute couple in that 15% of the audience that will like this picture. Fredric March makes the human charm believable, but he makes the remoteness, the detachment of the character from human concerns plausible too. March’s Death has an agenda that is not the agenda of us among the quick, his when and how are not our when and how.
March plays his part so as to give us movie-goers the impression that for all the sinister reputation, Death is not a complete bad hat. We are not taken in by the awkward magnetism and tidy attire so much that we want to meet the Grim Reaper before we absolutely have to. But we may become more willing to grant that Death is a part of the necessity of life, the cosmic order of things, so it had better be accepted with grace and bravery, not ferocity or fear. In other words, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” is just exactly what we shouldn’t do.
Evelyn Venable is perfectly cast because she has the ethereal air of a searcher who feels far away from other people, even from those they love, because they are hunting for an indescribable something. Inward and young, she feels the miraculous is nearby, a knowledge and serenity that she can understand only on her own. Movie-goers who are also seekers will enjoy her in this part because her performance may remind them of themselves. Many years ago. As Jobeth Williams cajoled her husband in Poltergeist, “Now just stand, okay? Now, just be calm. Okay. Now reach back into our past when you used to have an open mind. Remember that? Okay. Just try to use that for the next couple of minutes. Okay?”
And we’ll regret that loutish producers didn’t know what to do with actresses who had that otherworldly aura, spiritual oomph like Ann Harding and Evelyn Venable nor did they assign writers to come up with stories about our search for meaning, a topic hot among The Folks only in dire times (see The Razor’s Edge, 1944, i.e. during WWII).
* According to a study published in iScience, the number of Americans who read for pleasure every day has nosedived from 28 percent in 2004 to just 16 percent in 2023.
Extro: In her collection of reviews of movies from the early Sixties, The Private Eye, the Cowboy, and the Very Naked Girl: Movie from Cleo to Clyde, Judith Crist writes, "… we assuaged our guilt with the conviction that nothing in the outside world could provide the intellectual and emotional equivalent of Fredric March, his holiday over, enfolding Rochelle Hudson in his Death's cape …." Memory problems are understandable since Crist had seen the movie reviewed here 30 years before, when she was only 12 years old. Plus, Hudson and Venable are easily confused, both young, brunette, and both known for their fresh-faced looks and a gentle presence that become unfashionable in lead actresses and stars as the Thirties went by.