Oscars Retrospective: You Can't Take It With You (11th Academy Awards Review)

  

Polly Wolly Doodle~Burl Ives

You Can’t Take It With You was the 2nd movie made by Frank Capra to finally win the Oscar for Outstanding Production, after two years running where his films were contenders. It also ended up being the highest-grossing picture of 1938 so, as mentioned before, people really loved this guy’s movies back in the day. What’s interesting about it, though, is this is one of only two movies that he made that won Best Picture yet more contemporary reviewers seem to place it lower on his totem pole of quality. By no means do they consider it bad, but compared to It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Lost Horizon (1937), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), it’s considered a bit of a lesser movie. I personally disagree as I still think this is an all-American classic Capra film.

You Can’t Take It With You is one of the prime examples of the old-school screwball comedy, a genre that was one of the most lucrative moneymakers in 1930s and early 1940s Hollywood but has long since gone the way of the dodo. We already touched on them briefly in previous chapters but now seems as good a time as any to explain the genre more in-depth.

Pioneered primarily by It Happened One Night, the screwball as a genre was characterized by its zany characters, silly situations and usually boils down to a battle of the sexes as one of the leads tricks and schemes the other into ultimately marrying them (usually this is the woman though a few, such as Woman of the Year (1942), have the man doing this). Keep in mind that these are situations that would seem shocking to the sensitivities at the time with the woman actually having agency (the sexism of these movies tends to vary from film to film though, at the time, this was still a step forward).

In addition, screwball comedies tended to be very light-hearted and fluffy. Just about every modern comedy tends to have a much darker edge to it and roots its comedy much more deeply into the suffering and stupidity of its main characters. Screwball comedies, by contrast, seem to dial it back and just rely on the silly situations to get the comedy across. This I think makes most of them seem very dated since if there’s not that much energy and not that much suffering, then what is there really to laugh at?

Screwballs also don’t really have much of a scale to them either and have more in common with modern-day television sitcoms. Of course, television wasn’t a thing yet at this time but once it was, it did a lot to hasten the decline of screwballs. Seriously, that was the most bizarre thing about watching screwballs is how many times I feel like I’ve seen these movies before because just about every sitcom (e.g. Friends (1994-2004), The Flintstones (1960-1966), The Simpsons (1989-present), Family Guy (1999-present), The King of Queens (1998-2007)) took episode plots from them. Listen to some of these plot setups and tell me if you’ve seen this movie before, because odds are you have:

• A woman returns home from a voyage to find that her husband has remarried because he thought she was dead (My Favorite Wife (1940))

• Two husbands want to go to a party, but their wives won’t let them (Sons of the Desert (1933))

• A family gets a butler (My Man Godfrey (1936))

Bringing it back to You Can’t Take It With You, however, I do think this movie actually stands above most of the other screwballs of the time for two big reasons: energy and heart. Like many other great filmmakers, Capra and the writers identified the common tropes ongoing in a popular genre and then played with them to create a whole new thing.

You Can’t Take It With You, based off of the popular 1936 play (like I said, Golden Age Hollywood worked fast), is about two families: the Kirbies and the Vanderhofs. Martin Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore) is the kind, old patriarch of the Vanderhof clan. He spent his whole life preaching to them the importance of having fun and pursuing your passions instead of working yourself into the grave and, as a result, they’re all bouncing off the walls with enough rubber room insanity to make any normal sane human being want to shoot themselves shortly after entering their house.

For example.

Enter Anthony P. Kirby (Edward Arnold), a snobby, controlling munitions baron who will go to any means to undermine and destroy his competition and, wouldn’t you know it, the piece of land that he wants to develop into a factory is owned by Martin Vanderhof. To this end, he sends a series of blackmailers and corrupt police officers out to try to extort Martin into giving up the land. Unbeknownst to all, however, Kirby’s son, Tony (James Stewart) is dating Vanderhof’s granddaughter, Alice (Jean Arthur), and wants the two families to meet to get his parents’ blessing.

This is a pretty funny set-up to start with and they do everything they possibly can do with it. Besides the Vanderhof family just being generally odd to sometimes hilarious degrees (one of them is stockpiling homemade fireworks in the basement, eventually having so many that he’s in danger of bombing an entire city block) but the film also has the aforementioned energy that many other screwballs tend to dial back.

Both Anthony Kirby and his revolving door of henchmen are great punching bags for the audience to laugh at: the henchmen because of their increasing frustration at not being able to please their terrifying boss and Kirby because he and his pretentious wife (Mary Forbes) do their best to be polite to their son’s future in-laws whilst being awed by the insanity of their ways. It’s very nicely paced and Lionel Barrymore’s Martin Vanderhof is great at pushing other people’s buttons to rile them up. This is meant to try to sway them to his way of thinking but, in reality, it just ends up making them angrier, which makes it even funnier. The movie’s also very good at letting the jokes and wacky personalities of the Vanderhofs’ various friends and family members build up to bigger punchlines throughout the movie. (For the record, this isn’t just a glowing appraisal of the film at the time; I actually think that You Can’t Take It With You is still worth a few chuckles.)

So that’s the comedy but, being that this is a Frank Capra movie, there’s also a lot of heart and optimism that made his films so damn likable and, yeah, this movie has that as well. Officially, the main characters of the film are Tony and Alice (Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur’s characters), the couple who are caught in a kinda Romeo and Juliet scenario, but the movie is really more about the two fathers. They don’t meet until about halfway through the movie, and don’t even realize that they’re opponents until later than that, and when they do, you really get to see the lesson of the movie.

I don’t think I’m spoiling too much when I state that the lesson of You Can’t Take It With You is that it’s better to just let loose, have fun and pursue what you like to do even if it doesn’t make you any money instead of choosing the safe, stressful option. Of course, in modern days, generations raised on movies have come around to realizing that the whole idea of “money doesn’t buy happiness” is a complete and total crock of bull and rebel against people who propagate this dirty lie.

Note: while money doesn’t buy happiness, it does make misery a lot more fun.

You Can’t Take It With You is one of the earliest movies to have this moral; however, I think it still works in the film’s favor and holds up as opposed to other, later movies.

First, do bear in mind that this movie came out during the Great Depression which had been ongoing for close to a decade by this point. Given that the values of the American Dream were very much in the toilet for (checks 1938 unemployment rate) 19% of all Americans, and most of the rest were still just scraping by, a movie that says that it’s ok if you’re not wealthy so long as you appreciate your loved ones and have fun was a very reassuring movie to watch. (This logic is undoubtedly why it became the highest-grossing movie of the year and probably also helped it to win the Oscar.)

Second, is that You Can’t Take It With You isn’t really assaulting the idea of money not being able to buy happiness so much as just the attitude that most industrialists have that allows them to get that kind of money in the first place. Nothing’s wrong with getting more money, it’s placing it above the important things in life that’s wrong. This in turn ties into why I really love this movie and think it’s still worth going back to and helps make it stand out still: Anthony Kirby is one of cinema’s most underrated and forgotten great characters.

I honestly think that he’s probably the most complex, 3-dimensional and best villain that Frank Capra ever made. I do realize Capra’s most famous villain is obviously the nasty Mr. Potter from It’s A Wonderful Life and I think Senator Paine from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was a narrow miss on the American Film Institute’s Top 100 Greatest Movie Heroes and Villains list, but I believe that Edward Arnold’s Anthony Kirby outshines them both.

Unlike many other great evil moguls in cinematic history, Kirby isn’t portrayed as evil, he’s just a very desperately unhappy man who doesn’t really get it. It would’ve been so easy to portray him as the typical big business villain, but they do so much to humanize him. This is a character archetype (the overworked father who learns how to value family over money) who would pop up numerous times in future films, but I think this is still one of the best times it was done. Especially because the film does such a good job at establishing him so set in his ways that it does seem like redemption might be totally off the table. (Also, yes, I do think he was a severe snub for an acting Oscar. Don’t know which he’d be nominated for as I could see the character being Lead or Supporting but, regardless, Edward Arnold wasn’t nominated for either and was better than either of the actual winners.)

And, of course, this being a Capra film, the climax of the film is such a feel-good moment. I won’t spoil it but, like I said in chapter 7, Capra does a great job at making the audience smile and want to believe in the best of humanity.

You Can’t Take It With You, while possessing many of the typical hallmarks of the screwball comedy, is one of the standout films of its genre and, in some ways, pioneered multiple notes that would be present in many future comedies. While it still has that antiquated style of filmmaking and acting, you could really take this plot and slide it into the typical family picture out of the 90s and it would fit right at home.

But was it actually film of the year though?

In case you missed it:

1st Academy Awards (1927/28): Wings/Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans: Part 1, Part 2

2nd Academy Awards (1928/29): The Broadway Melody: Part 1, Part 2

3rd Academy Awards (1929/30): All Quiet on the Western Front: Part 1, Part 2

4th Academy Awards (1930/31): Cimarron: Part 1, Part 2

5th Academy Awards (1931/32): Grand Hotel: Part 1, Part 2

6th Academy Awards (1932/33): Cavalcade: Part 1, Part 2

7th Academy Awards (1934): It Happened One Night: Part 1, Part 2

8th Academy Awards (1935): Mutiny on the Bounty: Part 1, Part 2

9th Academy Awards (1936): The Great Ziegfeld: Part 1, Part 2

10th Academy Awards (1937): The Life of Emile Zola: Part 1, Part 2