Strange Holiday (1945)

Directed by Arch Oboler; produced by Frank Donovan, Edward Finney and A W Hackel

Returning from a holiday during which he was blissfully out of contact with the rest of the world, John Stevenson (Claude Rains) finds that in two weeks, his world has changed. People are gripped with fear, so scared that they can’t tell him what has happened. Repeated inquiries lead only to his arrest, incarceration and torture. It seems that while he was gone, America was taken over by Fascists…

Despite the intriguing premise that may be conveyed in the first paragraph, Strange Holiday is probably the worst movie I have reviewed on this blog. Rains is the only ‘name’ in the cast of this low-budget production, and he appears to have tailored his performance to his salary. The actor who gave life to rôles in Casablanca and Mr Skeffington, and made someone three-dimensional out of a person audiences couldn’t see in The Invisible Man, is rather awful here. There is no conviction in his acting, which comes across at times as amateurish. The other actors, excepting perhaps Milton Kibbee, as Stevenson’s friend, give mostly wooden performances.

The script is filled with irrelevant and meaningless scenes. Several flashbacks show Stevenson’s life before his arrest, including extended sequences featuring his children. A tedious scene of children decorating a Christmas tree, or giving a school speech, enlightens us not at all as to how things change, nor tells us anything about Stevenson’s family, other than that it includes three kids.

Much of the story has Stevenson roaming a city in which people are, one assumes, ordered home and off the streets, yet there is no mention of a curfew, no signs of troops or police patrolling; shops are not allowed to sell merchandise, though we are not told why. The impression is more of a mediocre episode of tv’s The Twilight Zone than of a realistic coup d’etat. When the explanation comes, it is rushed over a silly montage of marching people and talking mouths.

The production values are very low. Strange Holiday must have had producers from Hollywood’s ‘Poverty Row’ wanting to send it money. Except for a crowd in a school auditorium, the entire cast could have been put in a small bus. This would be fine for an intimate picture imitating a stage-play, but here, I almost expected to see the same people show up with fake moustaches, playing different characters. I had to check to make sure this was not one of Ed Wood’s productions.

Director Oboler made his name in radio - this movie comes from one of his radio scripts – and it is to that medium that he was probably suited; not motion pictures. The direction is sub-standard: everything is pretty obvious, with all the layering of a sheet of paper. Scenes that have no relevance go on far too long, and scenes that should be filled with intent leave the audience wondering what is going on. The denouement is such that I could not determine if it was a twist ending or simply poor editing.

Strange Holiday takes an interesting idea and throws it away through bad writing, bad directing, bad acting, bad editing and bad production values. It’s just a very bad movie.