You Can't Take It With You (Columbia, 1938)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next film on Turner Classic Movies’ January 3 agenda paying tribute to Columbia Pictures on its 100th anniversary (as Columbia; the predecessor company, CBC Productions, existed from 1919 to 1924) was Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You (1938). I saw this film for the first time at the 1970 San Francisco Film Festival under unusual auspices: Frank Capra himself was there, making a public appearance to promote his autobiography, The Name Above the Title. I loved the film – the central characters, the crazy family around Martin Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore, in his last role where he could still walk, albeit with crutches, before his chronic arthritis got so bad he needed a wheelchair), seemed like free-spirited hippies 30 years early – and so it was a shock to me when, right after a film about the pointlessness of working for, or caring about, money, Capra told the real-life story of how he’d been forced to close his independent production company, Liberty Films, because of money: specifically the amount of taxes he was forced to pay to the U.S. government because the tax laws at the time (the late 1940’s, a decade after he made You Can’t Take It With You) required independent stars and directors to pay themselves their going rate, on which the federal government enjoyed a 90 percent tax. (A lot of stars got around this by finding a loophole by which if they formed a company affiliated with the studio they were already under contract to, their salaries could be declared as capital gains rather than taxable income and subjected to only 25 percent tax.) You Can’t Take It With You began life as a mega-hit Broadway play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, which opened on December 14, 1936 and ran nearly two years. All the movie studios were interested in the rights, but Kaufman and Hart announced that they would sell the play to whichever studio first came up with their $250,000 asking price. Columbia Pictures’ production chief Harry Cohn was determined to make the offer, and reportedly his messenger arrived at the Kaufman-Hart office with the check just hours before Louis B. Mayer’s did from MGM. So Cohn had both the boasting rights that he’d beaten out MGM and that Columbia was now the studio that had paid the highest price ever for a story property.

You Can’t Take It With You begins in the offices of the bank owned by Anthony J. Kirby (Edward Arnold, in his first of three films for Capra; the others were Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Meet John Doe), whose directors are arranging a mega-merger that will give them control of 100 percent of the world’s armaments industry. (Obviously Kirby – and real-life authors Kaufman, Hart and Robert Riskin, Capra’s long-term writing partner who got the job of adapting the play into a script – were looking ahead to World War II here.) But to pull off the deal they need to surround their principal competitor’s factory by buying all 12 acres around it, and they’ve made deals to acquire all the properties involved except for one home owned by Martin Vanderhof. There’s another connection between the Vanderhofs and the Kirbys; Vanderhof’s granddaughter, Alice Sycamore (Jean Arthur, top-billed and another star Columbia rehabilitated after she’d bombed at other studios – in her case Paramount and RKO), works as a stenographer for Tony Kirby (James Stewart, billed third after Arthur and Barrymore), Anthony Kirby’s son and heir. Tony is being groomed to take over the Kirby banking empire when Anthony either retires or dies, but he couldn’t be less interested in it. Instead, he cherishes a dream he and a fellow student had in college to harness the sun’s power of photosynthesis to create energy for everyday use; in other words, he wanted to invent solar power. Martin Vanderhof used to be a major financier himself until one day he just walked away from his business empire because he realized he wasn’t having fun; instead he started collecting stamps, and soon became such an expert at it he found a source of income from other collectors seeking appraisals. The menagerie at the Vanderhof home includes Alice Sycamore; her parents Paul (Samuel S. Hinds) and Penny (Spring Byington, who got an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress); dancing student Essie Carmichael (Ann Miller, then just 15 years old); her husband Ed (former football star Dub Taylor); Kolenkhov (Mischa Auer), her dancing teacher, who’s convinced her she could be the next Pavlova even though what we see of her isn’t at all convincing as a ballerina (though Ann Miller would become a major star as a tap dancer); DePinna (Halliwell Hobbes), who lives in the Vanderhof basement and makes illegal fireworks; and Poppins (Donald Meek, an actor Capra admired so much that in his autobiography he wrote, “If the meek shall inherit the earth, may they all be Donalds”), who at the start of the film works as an accountant for John Blakeley (the marvelously slimy Clarence Wilson, the principal villain in the 1933 film Tillie and Gus with W. C. Fields and Alison Skipworth), but when Vanderhof comes to see Blakeley to refuse to sell his home again, he entices Poppins to quit and spend his time making novelty toys, his true love. There are also a Black servant couple, Donald (Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, who because his main gig was with Jack Benny got to play streetwise instead of stupid and therefore holds up better than most Black comedians in classic Hollywood) and Rheba (Lillian Yarbo).

The politics of You Can’t Take It With You are a crazy mixture of Right and Left (or at least what today’s audiences would read as Right and Left). At one point a tax collector shows up at the Vanderhof home and tries to intimidate Martin into paying a long-accumulating bill, and Martin turns on him and asks just what he gets for the taxes he pays – and the tax collector can’t give him a convincing answer. At the same time the film is at least vaguely progressive in its critique of capitalism and its assertion that there are more important values in life than making money – especially more money than you could possibly spend in several lifetimes. This reflects the ongoing tension between Right-leaning Capra (many people who met Capra were surprised and disgusted at how reactionary his politics were – he was a lifelong Republican who voted against Franklin D. Roosevelt all four times – especially since they’d assumed from his films he’d be progressive) and his Left-leaning writing partner, Robert Riskin. Ultimately the Vanderhofs throw a disastrous dinner party for the Kirbys (they question Alice about her “family tree,” and she points out that she’s actually named after a tree) that ends up with the Kirbys as well as the Vanderhofs getting arrested and facing night court. Kirby calls in four attorneys he has on retainer and Vanderhof pleads with the judge man-to-man, and the judge is impressed by how many friends Martin Vanderhof brings to court to support him versus how few (i.e., none) the Kirbys have. In the end Martin Vanderhof agrees to sell his home to the Kirbys after all, and Alice walks out on Tony Kirby out of disgust at the way his family thinks they can buy their way out of anything, only on the day his big deal is about to be consummated Anthony Kirby walks out on it (as Martin Vanderhof did decades earlier) and ends up as part of the Vanderhof ménage, playing harmonica duets with Martin (I’m not making this up, you know!). While I couldn’t help remixing the ending in my own mind – in my version, Anthony Kirby agrees to invest in his son’s solar-power start-up and the world moves decisively away from war and towards renewable energy – You Can’t Take It With You still holds up pretty well. It’s true it has some draggy moments (it’s a film that lasts two hours and six minutes, a rare example in classic Hollywood of a movie too long for its own good), and there are a few odd sequences that show Capra’s roots in silent comedy (specifically the writers’ rooms at Hal Roach and Mack Sennett where he got his start in films), but it’s a quite good movie even if it no longer seems the masterpiece it did when I first saw it in 1970.