March 7 movie: Death Takes a Holiday. As you might guess from the title, this movie features Death (Fredric March) going on vacation in mortal form for a few days. It's a lot less funny than I expected. In fact it's not really funny at all, except for a dry running gag about how no one in the world can die while Death is off the job.
The thing that surprised me was Death's personality. Very imperious, and also a real hothead. Tends to take offense at the tiniest presumed slight, and threatens to come back in his unearthly form and kill everyone at the drop of a hat. Somehow I imagined Death being more calm and detached. Death Takes a Holiday was of course the inspiration for Meet Joe Black. Which I haven't seen, because I'm not crazy about Brad Pitt and I heard it wasn't very good.
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