By the 1940s, he was working more on film than on stage. Holmes played a number of memorable roles, including the gullible millionaire conned in "Nightmare Alley" (1947), a shifty lawyer in "Kiss of Death" (1947), the Bishop of Avranches, who fiercely denounces Pierre Cauchon in the Ingrid Bergman "Joan of Arc" (1948), Marilyn Monroe's potential father-in-law in the 1953 "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" ("I don't want to marry your son for "his" money, I want to marry him for "your" money!"), and the voice of King Stefan in Disney's animated feature "Sleeping Beauty" (1959), Holmes' last credited screen role in which he replaced Hans Conried, who was the model reference for Stefan and recorded only a few additional dialogues. He also played Ebenezer Scrooge in what is largely considered a notoriously bad (and cheaply made) half-hour television version of Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol", first telecast in 1949.