Frank Capra (1938)

The Vanderhof-Sycamore family are so vigorously eccentric that they can be wearying.  Being a free spirit depends, it seems, on buying your own house then ignoring decades of tax demands; it also means conversational grace before meals.  In spite of their unconventionality, the family still has black servants.   The story is fundamentally pious and tedious when it’s explicitly serious, which is fortunately seldom.  But You Can’t Take It with You, adapted by Robert Riskin from George Kaufman and Moss Hart’s hit Broadway comedy of the same name, is mostly very entertaining.  When the crazy household’s dinner guests, a prospective son-in-law and his parents, arrive twenty-four hours earlier than expected – in other words, when the movie’s comic hyperactivity has a farcical situation to latch onto and get momentum from – it’s really funny.

Grandpa Martin Vanderhof plays the harmonica, an emblem of his untrammelled wackiness.  The financier Anthony P Kirby, who, with his snooty wife, arrives prematurely for dinner, also played the instrument as a youthful amateur and before he became a loveless mercenary.  You Can’t Take It with You taps into a resentment of money men in an America emerging from the Depression:  it takes Kirby a long time to see the error of his capitalist ways and even longer for him to play the harmonica duet with Grandpa which has to put the seal on his redemption.  But Edward Arnold is marvellous as the dyspeptic banker:  thanks to him, you believe in Kirby Sr even though the character is a device.  Arnold does some fine comic business in an unyielding chair that he keeps getting up from and sitting down in again.   James Stewart, as his son Tony, and Jean Arthur as Alice Sycamore, Tony’s inamorata, combine naturalism and star personality to great effect (both really are delightfully eccentric) – and they have wonderful chemistry.  Their anger and exasperation with, as well as their attraction towards, each other are very true.  As Grandpa, Lionel Barrymore is a bit too calculatedly roguish for my liking:  he also looks younger than Samuel S Hinds as his son-in-law (this character is something of a cipher) – it seems Grandpa has to be a generation older only in order to mourn his late wife.  I also found Mischa Auer unfunny as the Russian émigré who’s part of the Sycamore ménage, except for his delivery of ‘Omsk’, in answer to a policeman’s question ‘Where are you from?’   The cast also includes Spring Byington as Mrs Sycamore, Ann Miller as Alice’s younger sister Essie, and Mary Forbes as Mrs Kirby.

Frank Capra directs with complete confidence and often with sensitivity.  He orchestrates scenes with lots of people in them with particular skill – in a posh restaurant where Alice makes a spectacle of herself, in a jail, in a courtroom (Harry Davenport is excellent as the judge), and when the Sycamores, at the business end of the story, are preparing to move house.  I could have done without a sequence, towards the end of Tony and Alice’s romantic evening together, when they dance with some kiddies although James Stewart’s talent for graceful physical comedy just about saves it.

16 January 2013