1938: You Can't Take it With You

James Stewart and Jean Arthur

The Best Picture Oscar for 1938 went to Columbia Pictures' "You Can't Take It With You."  The film also won Best Director (Frank Capra), and was nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Spring Byington), Best Writing (Robert Riskin), Best Cinematography (Joseph Walker), Best Film Editing (Gene Havlick), and Best Sound Recording (John P. Livadary).

Ah, another delightful light comedy directed by Frank Capra - such a treat!  The stars this time around are a very young James Stewart and Jean Arthur as lovers from different social classes. As with Gable and Colbert in "It Happened One Night," the stars enjoy great on-screen chemistry.

The story begins with Anthony P. Kirby (Edward Arnold), a successful banker who is seeking to build a munitions factory.  In order to do so, he must acquire several residential properties, but there is one home-owner who refuses to sell: "Grandpa" Martin Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore).  Grandpa is the patriarch of a free-spirited household where everyone only does what truly makes them happy and pursues their own unique brand of creativity.  The merry band of
"weirdos" includes Grandpa's daughter Penny Sycamore (Spring Byington), who has taken to writing plays only because a typewriter was once erroneously delivered to her (later in the film she returns to a previous hobby of painting); her husband Paul Sycamore (Samuel Hinds), who manufactures fireworks in the basement; their daughter Essie Carmichael, an aspiring dancer who also produces candies; Essie's husband Ed (Dub Taylor) who plays the xylophone; and Essie's sister Alice (Jean Arthur), the least eccentric of the family, who works as a stenographer for the son of Anthony P. Kirby, Tony Kirby (James Stewart).  Other unrelated members of the household include Potap Kolenkhov (Mischa Auer), Essie's Russian dance instructor whose opinion of everything is "it steenks;" and Mr. Poppins (Donald Meek) as a former accountant who quits his job in favor of "making things up;" and Mr. DePinna (Halliwell Hobbes), who prints the advertising campaigns for the fireworks. There are also the servants Rheba (Lillian Yarbo) and Donald (Eddie Anderson).

When Tony proposes to Alice, she insists that their families meet each other, and invites Tony to dinner at her home.  Wanting his snobbish parents to see Alice's family as they truly are, he intentionally brings his parents on the wrong night.  Alice's family is in full "free-spirit" mode, and the evening does not go well, with everyone ending up in jail.

Halliwell Hobbes, Spring Byington, Dub Taylor, Ann Miller, and Mischa Auer

There's no point in going over each and every twist in the plot - the outcome is what you'd expect.  The senior Kirby comes to realize there's more to life than money, and that friends and passion are what really make life worth living.  Despite their ups and downs, and their seemingly insurmountable differences, the young lovers are allowed to be together at last, living happily ever after.

I thought this was a thoroughly delightful film.  It was charming, sweet, and funny.  I must say, though, I'm surprised at Spring Byington's nomination for Best Supporting Actress.  She wasn't bad, mind you (no one in the cast was), but it seems to me that others of the "eccentrics" stood out more than she did, particulary Donald Meek as Mr. Poppins and Lillian Yarbo as the maid Rheba.

Nonetheless, I really enjoyed "You Can't Take It With You."