Best Picture Winner: #11
Original Release Date: September 29, 1938
Rating: Passed
Runtime: 2 hours, 6 minutes
Director: Frank Capra
Quick Impressions:
I first saw Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You when I checked it out of the public library at seventeen, and I hated it. Here’s why. When I was fifteen, I played Penny (aka Penelope Vanderhof Sycamore) in my high school’s production of Moss Hart and George S. Kauffman’s Pulitzer Prize winning stage play. In the play, Penny has a huge, fantastic part. I’m pretty sure she has more lines than anyone but Grandpa. But that’s not all. She also gets some of the most hilarious material. Frank Capra’s movie guts Penny’s part, which was naturally disappointing for me.
“I can’t stand this Penny!” I kept yelling. Meanwhile, my mother kept trying to redeem the movie in my eyes, insisting, “But this is Spring Byington! She’s a very respected actress.” (And she must have been because she was somehow Oscar nominated for this wreck of a Penny!) I’m not knocking Byington’s performance, just the material she’s given. She definitely makes the most of it. But imagine if she’d had my part! With my part and her acting skills, Byington would have owned this movie!
The film also immediately introduces the added character of Mr. Poppins, a would-be toymaker who meets the family early on. I’ve read that his purpose is to stand in for the theater audience, to give the movie audience a way into the story. As a teen, I really bristled at this whole concept. If Mr. Poppins the timid toymaker could suddenly exist, then why couldn’t Penny have her lines back?
But the years have passed, and I’ve adapted my take on screen adaptations (though I still think that Ivanhoe with Robert and Elizabeth Taylor is a disgrace, and I’ll never understand why every film version of The Count of Monte Cristo makes changes to a thrilling novel to make it more boring!).
Anyway, I decided to give Capra’s You Can’t Take It with You another chance. I tried to wipe the other experience from my mind in the interest of fairness. And I was excited to show my daughter a play that meant a lot to me personally. I have so many fond memories of that production—my skull candy jar; the time the snake we’d borrowed mysteriously died, throwing us all into a panic until we belatedly learned from the owner that the snake had been terminally ill; the time the kittens wandered all over the stage; the time I fell coming up the stairs back stage in order to come down the stairs on stage for my entrance; the time I stepped on a fork and slid across the stage with my dress flying up over my head; the night I got the wrong typewriter; the way our Mr. Kolenkhov always did my make-up for me, carefully putting on every wrinkle; the time my dress ripped while I was wearing it, and our Rheba amazed me by skillfully sewing the hole in the wings, while I was still wearing the dress!
Not only was Penny one of my favorite parts in high school, but my younger sister later played Essie. (We were also both in Our Town. I was Mrs. Webb; she was Mrs. Gibbs. That makes it sound like our high school did the same plays over and over, but actually I was Penny at my first high school, Mrs. Webb at my third, and she went to a fourth high school six years later.)
The point is, I was eager to show my daughter You Can’t Take It with You, even in this altered form, and I tried to watch with an open mind this time. It isn’t just Penny’s part that’s radically different, though. I had forgotten most of this movie, but I’ve discovered I still don’t like it much. I vowed not to compare it to the play but found I couldn’t help myself.
The Plot:
(This is different from the play, too.) Mr. Anthony Kirby, Sr. runs a highly profitable company, and is just about to complete a morally shady business deal giving him a lucrative monopoly. Part of his plan involves buying up certain real estate, but one person on the block won’t sell, stubborn old Martin Vanderhof (affectionately known as Grandpa to everyone who is not trying to swindle him). Meanwhile, Kirby’s son (and vice president) Tony has fallen madly in love with his secretary, who happens to be Alice Sycamore, granddaughter of Martin Vanderhof. Tony discovers that he loves Alice’s wildly eccentric family, including but not limited to her mother Penny, who writes plays, her father Paul, who makes fireworks in the basement, her sister Essie, a dancer/candy maker, her brother-in-law Ed a printer/xylophone player. Tony thinks that his parents will love Alice’s family, too. They do not. Then the IRS comes, J-Men arrive, the house blows up, and everybody goes to jail.
The Good:
I’m going to take a breath and pretend I’ve never seen or read the play. There’s no denying this film doesn’t have a high caliber cast. Lionel Barrymore is always great in everything. Last night, I was so impressed at how different his Grandpa was from his Kringelein in Grand Hotel. They both get to make impassioned, righteous speeches. (Barrymore excels at this. It seems like he does it in every movie I’ve seen him in.) But they seem like totally different men making the speeches. Back in high school, our Grandpa was a fantastic actor, but I have no complaints about Lionel Barrymore. Even when I don’t always like the movie, I still like Barrymore as Grandpa.
Even though she gets almost none of her lines, Spring Byington also makes a fantastic Penny. Now, granted her Penny seems a little dingier than mine (which actually really bothers me). My Penny was a slightly different flavor of dingbat, far more obsessed with sex (which is called for by the script. To this day, every time I walk by an orchid—which is often since I have several right outside my bedroom door—I think, “Believe it or not, I was waiting for an orchid.” It was a line in the script that none of us understood. With all these years to think about it, I now believe the cadence should have suggested waiting for a friend or a bus. At the time, everybody told me, “Just try to make it sound like innuendo. Everything Penny says is always dirty.” I did my best.) But Spring Byington is fantastic when she gets such a thrill out of seeing the J-Men’s guns. She plays that scene really well. And I absolutely love the way she uses a kitten for a paper weight. Each time she finishes a page, she rips it out of the typewriter, picks up the kitten, sets the paper on the stack, and replaces the kitten. I wish I’d have thought of that (though our kittens almost certainly would not have cooperated). She’s also better at crying than I am.
I also absolutely love Halliwell Hobbes as Mr. DePinna. Somehow, without ever saying much at all, he makes the part so much funnier than I imagined. He just has this immense gravitas that becomes situationally hilarious. I can’t decide if I love or hate it that he has a pet crow named Jim.
We’re big Ann Miller fans at our house, so it’s great to see her as Essie. Personally, I think she should dance around a little more. (Well, what I mean, I guess, is that she should be on screen more!) And Mischa Auer makes a fabulous Kolenkhov (though ours was a very good actor, as well. Right after that, he played Jesus in Godspell.) Auer certainly has a dramatic presence (but how is he at doing old-age make-up?).
It was nice to see Eddie “Rochester” Anderson as Donald. (He’s in Topper Reutrns, too. Apparently my daughter has not seen the Topper movies, which I discovered during our recent conversation about Billie Burke following The Great Ziegfeld.) Lilian Yarboo is good as Rheba, too. (Our Donald and Rheba were Irish out of necessity and also gave excellent performances.)
Charles Lane is superb as Henderson, and Mary Forbes makes a wonderfully awful Mrs. Kirby. Even though he’s not in the play, I also enjoyed Harry Davenport as the judge.
Now in the stage play, Alice and Tony are the romantic leads and have decent sized parts, but their parts are really built up here. For the most part, this worked for me. I mean, why would you not want more Jean Arthur and James Stewart? (My daughter is quite familiar from James Stewart, thanks to our Hitchcock project two summers ago, but she didn’t know Jean Arthur. She liked her, though. “She seems more like someone who would be in a movie today,” she remarked. “You have to watch The Ex-Mrs. Bradford!” I exclaimed immediately. How I love The Ex-Mrs. Bradford! I think I was about her age when I discovered it, maybe a hair younger. For months, I kept wanting to murder everyone by the method revealed in the film—in works of fiction, I mean.)
I have no problem with the bulking up of Alice and Tony’s parts. In fact, Stewart and Arthur (together and separately) are part of what makes this film so watchable. Most of the movie’s best and strongest scenes involve them.
I have more of a problem with Edward Arnold taking over the whole movie as Tony’s father, Mr. Kirby. Edward Arnold is a great actor. His performance, I do not slight in the least. He does give an excellent performance.
One thing I found interesting–many talking points of this movie (which I do not believe were in the play) really resonate with talking points of today. Grandpa denounces “isms” and claims, “Nowadays they say, ‘Think the way I do, or I’ll bomb the living daylights out of you.'” Doesn’t that sound familiar? Later, Tony says that he’s been trying to understand how plants convert sunlight to power in order to work out an alternative energy source. That sounds very of our own moment, too. I mean, this was eighty years ago.
Best Scene:
In the play, the surprise dinner party scene is probably the best. It’s quite good here, too. Of course, it breaks my heart that they don’t play Penny’s game, but I love Kolenkhov’s wrestling. (Did Edward Arnold do his own stunts?)
Another extremely strong sequence is the “rat” in the restaurant. I remember it particularly because it’s one of the few new-for-the-movie sequences that didn’t annoy me.
I also sort of like the final harmonica scene. I tell myself, “Now, remember, this is a different story.” It is a good conclusion.
Best Action Sequence:
James Stewart and Jean Arthur make a good pair. (They’re equally good apart.) For some strange reason, I find it delightful when they learn to dance the Big Apple.
Best Scene Visually:
Although Grandpa’s talk with Alice up in her bedroom evokes exactly the sort of tone that doesn’t really belong in the story, I do love the way we get to see Arthur and Barrymore in the mirror as they speak. I love photography that incorporates mirrors.
I also enjoyed getting a peek at all the fireworks down in the basement.
The Negatives:
Compared to the stage play by Kaufman and Hart, well…there’s no comparison, no contest. The play is better. This screen version is so bloated. The pacing is terrible, and so many unnecessary scenes and characters make the whole thing drag. The movie also guts the part of Penny, reduces the lines of Essie and Rheba, and completely removes two delightful female characters (Gay Wellington and the Grand Duchess Olga Katrina), replacing them with 157,000 boring men. Of course, as a teenager, I was mad because the movie cut so many of my lines. But as an adult, I suddenly noticed, “Wait a minute, they basically silenced all the women.” And don’t tell me there wasn’t time to let them talk! This movie feels like it’s about five hundred hours long, and Edward Arnold gets an entire scene to stare in anguish at his intercom. I don’t think this is intentionally sexist. I doubt very much it was Capra’s intention to silence all the women. But still, he does.
The one female role that is built up is Alice, the romantic lead. And I totally understand (and approve) of building up Jean Arthur’s part for the film. Tony’s role is also enlarged, and again, this makes sense. Alice and Tony are pivotal characters played by movie stars Jean Arthur and James Stewart. Sure, give them more material. I would watch them talk about trapezes and dance the Big Apple, and scream their way through fancy restaurants all day long. But why is Tony’s father suddenly the protagonist of the film? (Nothing against Edward Arnold, but if you’re going to introduce the family to the movie audience through the lens of Mr. Kirby, then why do you need the pointless character of Mr. Poppins?)
It frustrates me so much to see Mr. Kirby gobbling up screentime, especially because the lesson he is there to teach us is so annoying. I mean, obviously, “You can’t take it with you,” is a driving moral of the play, too, but when you watch the play (or at least when you perform it), you don’t feel like you’re being taught a lesson. You feel like you’re having a wacky good time. Here everything is so cloying or…I don’t know. There’s a scene when everybody in a packed courtroom passes the hat to save Grandpa because they’re all his friends, gosh golly. (Meanwhile, money-obsessed ol’ Mr. Kirby doesn’t have true friends.) I mean, come on, Frank Capra, we get it. How many times do we need to see It’s a Wonderful Life? This is You Can’t Take it With You!
I’m sure some of this is personal prejudice driven by my love for the play. I mean, I loved all the scenes of common people living through the Depression in Capra’s It Happened One Night. But okay, look, the entire stage play takes place inside one house, basically in one big room. Meanwhile here we get a bunch of little rascals playing the accordion in a park, and a jail cell full of folks down on their luck, and the whole darn town coming together to save Grandpa in the court, plus a lecture against “isms,” and a decent man dropping dead in an evil boardroom. It’s all kind of heavy-handed. It also makes the movie bloated and slow. The last half hour just drags and drags and drags. Grandpa seems wise, calm, and eccentric in the play. Here he’s like that sometimes, but we get the idea that he is also secretly enraged, and that he thinks everything in life should be a Norman Rockwell painting or else. It’s a different vibe, for sure. It’s weirdly syrupy and ranklingly patriotic in a way that the play isn’t. Listen, I love America. I love God. I love my family. But isn’t this supposed to be a comedy? The movie is preachy and entirely too focused on Mr. Kirby. It has pacing problems as a result.
Also, I’m just not crazy about Dub Taylor’s Ed. I’ve got nothing against Taylor, but as I watched, I just couldn’t help remembering our own Ed’s paranoia that people were following him. I think he made the character much funnier.
Overall:
You Can’t Take It with You is a horrible adaptation of the play, but it’s still a decent movie, especially if you like Frank Capra. My daughter has ranked it eighth on her list of eleven, between Cavalcade and The Broadway Melody. (I personally like The Broadway Melody better, but obviously I can’t manage to be objective with this one.) Capra is a great director, but perhaps he was the wrong person to give the movie-viewing world You Can’t Take It with You. I myself prefer his Arsenic and Old Lace. One day I hope to play the Josephine Hull part on the stage in community theater. Funnily enough, Josephine Hull also played Penny on the stage in You Can’t Take it With You. I wish I could have seen her.