You Can't Take It With You

NR	Rottentomatoes.com Rating:96%	1938
(Nothing offensive)	Picky Flicks Quote: "The excellent ensemble cast makes it an enjoyable breeze, and the in-laws meeting scene is farce comedy at its best." -Emma Cochrane, Empire Magazine	RUNTIME: 1hr. 49 mins.
Visit:www.screenit.com for complete details		Movie Mood: Loony

You Can't Take It With You is a light, airy confection of a movie that, were it not so darn likable and well-acted, could easily have become too cloyingly sweet in its unflagging cheerfulness. As it is, there’s enough honest-to-goodness slapstick and zip to keep the proceedings from triggering all but the most humbug of old codgers’ gag reflexes.

If there’s one thing I’ll say about Frank Capra (the director of You Can't Take It With You, It's a Wonderful Life, and other equally peppy films), it’s that he’s not afraid to pound his audience over the head with a message (just check out the titles of the two movies I’ve already mentioned). Fortunately for that same audience, he’s also quite good at making us laugh all while coaxing winning performances out of his leads. (So winning in this case that You Can't Take It With You won the Academy Award for Best Picture).

Jimmy Stewart (who, incidentally, also played the lead in Wonderful Life ten years later) plays Tony Kirby, the pampered but surprisingly unspoiled heir to a banking fortune, which he will someday inherit from his business tycoon father, Anthony Kirby Sr. But Tony doesn’t exactly have dear old dad’s killer instinct. Even though he tells his girlfriend that he’s gotten whatever he’s wanted since childhood simply by screaming for it, he spends the rest of the movie being too docile to truly support such a claim. His father, on the other hand—although a tad more good natured than your average money-obsessed tyrant—is typically ruthless. In fact, he’s just about to close a deal that will earn him millions—money that he can then pile right on top of all the dough he’s been raking in throughout his brilliant career (not to mention the bucket loads he inherited from his own father; the Kirbys have an illustrious family tree, you see). In the process, he will bankrupt a rival (and former friend) and evict hundreds of people from their homes.

There’s just one tiny problem. Grandpa Vanderhof (who also shows up in It's a Wonderful Life as the curmudgeonly Potter), the pater familias of a clan of somewhat addled folks who are (mostly) related in some capacity and all reside in a rundown old house that lies squarely in the middle of the stretch of land that Kirby Sr. needs to buy up in its entirety for his merger to work, won’t sell his house.

Why not? Well, it’s certainly not a matter of money as Kirby Sr. quickly finds out when Grandpa steadfastly rejects offer and after increasingly outrageous offer. No, it seems to have something to do with the old coot’s love of his home (not his house) and the people who live in it. And what people they are. There’s a drawling football player from Alabama who loves to play the xylophone and print things (never mind what they actually end up saying), his ditzy wife who makes homemade candy she calls Love Dreams and has a few dreams of her own of being a ballerina, Grandpa’s son, who’s no spring chicken himself but still spends the vast majority of his time creating (and exploding) homemade fireworks in the basement, and the matriarch of the family who spends most of her days pecking out the manuscripts for plays on a typewriter (Why? Because the typewriter was accidentally delivered to the house, and that’s not a thing you can let go to waste, now is it?). The house is also overrun by kittens and crows and all manner of other critters and objects so that it often resembles a circus that has collided with a flea market right in somebody’s living room.

There is one fairly sane Vanderhof, however, and that’s Alice (the would-be ballerina’s sister), who just so happens to be a stenographer (read: secretary who types) for the Kirby empire and who also just so happens to be Tony Kirby’s love interest. Of course, Tony’s mother is scandalized. After all, how would it look in the papers if her blue-blooded, filthy rich only child aligned himself with a…a…secretary (she can hardly get the word out). But she’s not so foolish as to miss the fact that Tony is truly smitten with Alice and so decides to “get to know the girl a little better” in hopes of undermining her in person and giving Tony a true feel for the unsuitability of the match.

But when Alice invites the Kirbys over for dinner and carefully plans a decidedly un-Vanderhofesque evening (complete with real cloth napkins, something other than pickled pig’s feet and sauerkraut for dinner, and no crows in sight), it seems like she might just succeed in fooling Mrs. Kirby. That is until Tony deliberately brings his parents on the wrong night so that they will have an authentic glimpse of the Vanderhofs in their usual state of repose. Of course, true to the movie’s energetic form, the Kirbys walk in on a scene of utter chaos; pirouetting, raucous singing, old men posing in “classical Roman” garb for silly portraits, and Alice sliding down the banisters triumphantly shouting, “Look, no hands!” The expression on Mrs. Kirby’s face is so sour that—who knows?—shoving a pickled pig’s foot in her mouth might be an improvement.

Then, of course there’s a police raid in the midst of the madness (I did mention the slapstick, didn’t I?), and everyone present, including the sublimely huffy Kirbys (except Tony who looks thoroughly entertained) are carted off to jail. In no time, it’s revealed that Grandpa Vanderhof is in possession of the very bit of land that Mr. Kirby so craves and that the only reason they’re all in the pokey is that Mr. Kirby insisted that his realtor have Grandpa and his family tailed in order to dig up some “dirt” that will force them to sell the house.

A preposterous courtroom scene follows during which the room steadily fills to the brim with Grandpa’s friends while the Kirby’s only allies are their four highly paid lawyers (I did mention that subtlety is not Capra’s strong suit, didn’t I?). The proceedings are rounded out by Alice's screaming that it’s the Kirbys who are not good enough for her family (after some particularly nasty comments about pureness of blood from Mrs. Kirby), not the other way around and that she has no intention of ever marrying Tony. She flees amidst the pop of flashbulbs and the catcalls of frenzied journalists.

With Alice exiled and unwilling to return to face the endless publicity and the possibility of running into Tony, Grandpa reconsiders his refusal to sell. After all, it’s more important that his eccentric family stay together than that they stay rooted in any one spot, no matter how dear and full of…ahem…history. And so he receives a cool quarter of a million for his dilapidated digs, and the entire neighborhood is evicted because of it.

The end.

Just kidding. After all, this is a Capra film. (Really) happy endings are a must. I won’t tell exactly how it all goes down, but let’s just say that there’s a harmonica involved. And what could be better than that?

Until next Wednesday, stay picky! Your mind will thank you later.