Mitchell Leisen directed this fascinating and ambitious allegory, scripted by Maxwell Anderson, in which Frederic March is featured as Death, who enters the world of the living to discover why humans fear and loathe him. He spends three days as a guest in a heavenly Florentine palazzo and falls in love with a woman who returns his love, thinking he is “Prince Sirki,” his chosen disguise. Meanwhile, while Death is masquerading as a mortal, wilted flowers regain their bloom, suicides alight unharmed on sidewalks, and wars bring in no casualities.
Leisen, who had spent some ten years as a costume designer, art director and assistant to De Mille before joining Paramount's “new generation” of directors (with Sturges and Wilder) in 1933, brought his background in art and architecture to his stylish productions of the thirties and forties. Critic John Baxter (Hollywood in the Thirties), who considers Death Takes a Holiday one of Leisen's three most important films of the period (with Murder at the Vanities and Midnight), writes: “Death Takes a Holiday, though flawed by an unlikely plot, is extravagant in concept and design. Frederic March...is at his best, playing the role with a combination of arrogance and childish delight. The mannered accent, monocle and pompous speech are perfectly judged. His romance with the beautiful but self-destroying Grazia (Evelyn Venable) is played out among drooping Italianate gardens, silent fountains and pools of black water. As the melancholy ‘Destiny Waltz' floats from a party going on in the villa, she sits by a fountain, draped in his black cloak, and talks of death and parting. It is a strange film, notable for its decoration (designed by Leisen and Hans Dreier), skating the delicate line between poetry and comedy but never quite slipping over.”