You Can't Take It With You (1938)

Winner of the 1939 Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director (Frank Capra), You Can't Take it With you was also nominated for Best Supporting Actress (for Spring Boyington's performance as Penny Sycamore, the female lead's kooky amateur-playwright mother), and for best adapted screenplay. This film was the last of Capra's three Oscars for Best Director, and the fourth of six nominations. While not Capra's most memorable film, this is a prime example of his trademark style, his masterful mixing of the cornball with the contemporary, and of hokey small-town sentimentalism with world-weary cynicism. Capra's films, when viewed with modern eyes, have a way of seeming simultaneously ridiculously dated and yet ahead of their time and still topical in today's world.

You Can't Take It With You tells the story of a young bank vice-president, Tony Kirby, handed the job by his bank-owner father, who decides to marry his secretary, a woman who happens to be a member of the family whose refusal to sell off their home is standing in the way of the biggest business deal of the bank-owner's career. Sticking with the same theme as Capra's later (and more widely known and loved) film, It's A Wonderful Life, the over-arching message of the film is that money does not lead to happiness, and that no man is truly poor who has friends. Slapstick comedy ensues, of course, as Tony's new fiancee strives to get the straight-laced Kirby family to accept her unconventional family, and Grandpa tries to show the elder Kirby that there is more to life that business and money.

This film shares two stars with the later film, but in a rather startling reversal. James Stewart plays Tony Kirby, the young vice-president. Kirby, like George Bailey, is a young man trapped in his family's banking business, unable to escape to live out his bigger dreams. However, unlike George Bailey, who is trapped by feelings of familial obligation and a desire to sacrifice his own happiness and ambition for the sake of doing the right thing, Kirby is instead trapped by the path of least resistance, by the fact that, as long as he stays in his family's good graces, he can have anything that he wants simply by screaming loud enough. In this film, it is as though Stewart is trapped in his job at Potter's bank, rather than at the old Bailey Bros. Building and Loan. In fact, the same circumstance of being trapped in the family business that make George Bailey such a likable character are what make Tony Kirby seem so spoiled and selfish.

On the other hand, Lionel Barrymore, best known for playing Old Man Potter in It's A Wonderful Life, here plays Grandpa Martin Vanderhof, the grandfather of Stewart's love interest and free-spirited patriarch of the family that refuses to move out of the way of big business. Vanderhof, once a businessman like Kirby's father, decided one day many years before that, though he was making a lot of money, he was not getting any joy out of his life, so he abandoned his career and raised his family to pursue whatever passing fancies interested them without regard to money or success. The familial home is part madhouse, part pre-hippie commune, with his daughter writing plays "because a typewriter was dropped off at the house by mistake," his son-in-law making fireworks in the basement, and a granddaughter splitting her time between making candy and practicing ballet, and various neighbors and adopted strangers showing up to work on their hobbies and partake in free meals. When confronted with the fact that he owes 22 years of back income tax, Vanderhof dismisses the charge, saying that he simply doesn't believe in taxes. (OK, I guess that part does resemble Old Man Potter.)

Capra's films have always struck me as very anti-capitalist, anti-business, and very favorable of the attitude that people have a responsibility to contribute to the greater good of their society. In a word, Capra's films have always struck me as rather communistic. Imagine my surprise when, in doing a little (very little, actually) research, I found that Capra (as well as his frequent star, James Stewart) was a life-long Republican and an anti-communist crusader.