Death Takes a Holiday Gave Myrna Loy and Melvyn Douglas a Late Chance to Shine

From 1969 to 1975, ABC put out weekly films. They functioned as TV pilots, testing grounds for up-and-coming filmmakers, and places for new and old stars to shine. Every month, Chloe Walker revisits one of these movies. This is Movie of the Week (of the Month).

As common as it was, there remained a certain stigma to old Hollywood stars showing up in ‘70s TV movies, and that’s not difficult to understand. Aging as a movie star is a notoriously fraught process. Going from the peak of glamor on the silver screen in your youth, to being older and saggier, in productions with a fraction of the budget you once merited, when your performance is sandwiched between commercials for dishwashing liquid and pet food—well, for an industry that subsists on escapism, it’s all a little bit too real. 

Yet as we’ve already discussed in this column’s very first edition, Movies of the Week could also give established stars the valuable chance to try something completely different on a stage with considerably lower stakes. Or they could reunite old friends with charming results.  Or, as in 1971’s Death Takes a Holiday, they could be poignant reminders that some talents simply don’t fade with time.

Peggy Chapman (Yvette Mimieux) is saved from drowning in the sea off her family’s private island by a handsome stranger calling himself David Smith (Monte Markham). Her family is hugely grateful and invites this stranger to join them for the Labor Day weekend’s activities. As the weekend draws on, Peggy’s mother (Myrna Loy) and father (Melvyn Douglas) begin to think there’s something off about “David.”

And they’re right: David is the temporarily human embodiment of Death, planning to take Peggy back to the great beyond with him. That he has fallen in love with her… well, that complicates matters. Once his identity has been revealed, the rest of the sunny holiday weekend becomes a literal battle for Peggy’s soul.

This was not the first time a film would tackle this story, and nor would it be the last. In 1934, Death Takes a Holiday—which started life as a play by Italian scribe Alberto Casella—was made as a feature starring Fredric March as Death. Though that film had an intriguingly eerie atmosphere and a solid performance from March, it was too little removed from its stage origins to make for a dynamic or memorable movie.

At the other end of the spectrum, and the other side of the 1971 version, was 1998’s Meet Joe Black. Three hours in duration, it was more than twice as long as both its predecessors, and yet it focused far less on the philosophical ramifications of the love between Death and a mortal woman than either. Instead, it spent its copious runtime on watching Brad Pitt’s Death fall in love with peanut butter and speak in Jamaican patois. 

In a Goldilocks reading of the three adaptations, it’s the humble ABC MOTW version of Death Takes a Holiday that comes out just right. There are a lot of interesting things about this edition. The decision to adapt the central family to be a stand-in for the Kennedys—the Chapmans have achieved great wealth and success in many public spheres, while being beset by an onslaught of awful tragedies—nicely updates the source material (which cast them as generic European aristocracy). Death Takes a Holiday aired, after all, just three years after RFK’s assassination. 

Laurindo Almeida’s acoustic guitar soundtrack excels at weaving a hazy, deceptively relaxed late-summer atmosphere. Production design came courtesy of Eugène Lourié, who’d also worked on Abel Gance’s 1927 epic Napoleon, Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight, Sam Fuller masterpieces Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss, and MOTW(OTM) favorite, Haunts of the Very Rich. 

But most of all, it’s the luminous late career work from Myrna Loy and Melvyn Douglas that makes 1971’s Death Takes a Holiday special. During the ‘30s and ‘40s, both were best known for their association with light comedy. The two classic Hollywood films they made together—Third Finger, Left Hand and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House—required little more from the pair than elegant witticisms and pratfalls. 

As the years rolled on however, Douglas and Loy started taking on more dramatic roles. By 1971’s Death Takes a Holiday, when they were on and approaching the cusp of 70, the two had earned their reputations as elder statespeople; the elegance of their youth was still there, but now it carried with it a gravitas. Audiences had seen them age before their eyes, and had aged right alongside them. There’s an inbuilt intimacy in that, a shared vulnerability (though he’d go on to live another decade, Douglas looked particularly frail here).

Loy’s character, Selena, has borne the brunt of her family’s suffering, having outlived more than one of her children. We expect her to be the most anti-Death, furious at all it has taken from her. Instead, her loss has made her grateful; she wouldn’t appreciate what she has to the extent that she does if she hadn’t lost so very much. Loy is gifted the most beautiful passage in the whole teleplay, and she invests it with regal, heavy-souled contemplativeness:

No… [Death’s] not my friend. But if I couldn’t accept his existence by now, my mind would have been in pieces years ago. No, to me he’s just a fact, like night or clouds or quiet. How could there be anything so terrifying about anything so common, so inevitable? I don’t mean that we should just lie back and accept death like another rainy day, but when it comes to that last moment, who’s to say that it’s a tragedy… except for those of us who may survive? But no one can speak for those who have left us.

Douglas’ Earl is far less sanguine than his wife, the first to sense that something is deeply wrong with the man that seems to have saved Peggy’s life. As ailing as he is, he assumes Death has come for him; when he learns it’s actually his daughter that David/Death is after, he’s frantic and horrified. Earl is a powerful man, used to getting his own way, but he can’t control death the way he can most things in life. He attempts to bargain, to wheedle and persuade, but he can’t get any purchase. Douglas plays that desperation from such a vulnerable place, it burns through the screen, making the confrontations with “David”—and even Selena, whom he expected to take his side in the matter—feel urgent, poignant and surprisingly real.

Death Takes a Holiday continues on for another 10 minutes or so after the last time we see Douglas and Loy, but the remainder seems inconsequential after their absence. Though it may be beautiful young things Yvette Mimieux and Monte Markham that were the ostensible leading pair here, it’s Loy and Douglas who do the emotional heavy lifting. It’s the two old pros that take the fantastical story and invest it with genuine human feeling. As Myrna Loy put it in her autobiography, Being and Becoming, “When you get two people together who really know their stuff, everything seems to come so easily and so right.”

The ABC MOTW proved time and again, with Death Takes a Holiday being one of the very best examples, that through the ravages of time and the comparative indignities of the smaller screen, there were some stars that just couldn’t be diminished. 

Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.