One remake of Last Holiday starred the entertainer Queen Latifah. But the earlier version starred a gentle Alec Guinness. He plays an agricultural machinery salesman, George Bird, who has just been told he has an incurable disease. In a daze, he cashes out his savings and life insurance and takes a last holiday, hoping to spend his last days in a happy state. He decides to spend time in the posh Pinebourne Hotel, where the clientele is select.
When he arrives, everyone speculates who he is and makes up rumors which imagine George to be a more affluent person than he is. Things he does unwittingly make good fortune for himself--lucrative job offers, gambling wins--things he never got when he needed them; he also makes good fortune for others as the film shows him helping others without their knowledge. But none of this is making him happy, and, being by nature a loner, he has no one to confide in.
There are many points in the script where people make ironic comments of death, not knowing George's secret, and you can see George react to them, you can almost see the lump in his throat. Guinness does a fine job playing the wistful melancholia of the character, holding his secret in. I wished for the character's sake that the film would finally set him up with the hotel's head housekeeper, who seemed attracted to him. Kay Walsh as the housekeeper is pretty empathetic in her role, she is sort of motherly so her attraction to George feels natural even though as she admits there is something about him she can't quite put her finger on. The entire emotional journey is of George wanting to belong someplace but never quite getting there.
The many supporting characters are also good. There are the major characters of a husband and wife living beyond their means so are in need of money; the housekeeper of course; although others are are more minor characters, they are all definable, such as a lady's companion given the chance to break away and live her own life, that compare and contrast to George's situation. Each of them are on their own metaphorical last holiday in one way or another.
The ending of the story felt heavy handed, in contrast to the rest of the film, which is a lot about subtleties. How George's situation ended and how the people at the hotel ended up thinking of him was not in the spirit of the rest of the film, which disappointed me. I was waiting for a feel-good ending to know that "all was right in the world" but the story didn't end that way. But it does show how fine George's character is, in all senses of that word, even if other people return to their shell of safety at the end of the day.
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