You Can't Take It With You (1938)

Frank Capra

Picture an avuncular fellow on crutches, whom everybody knows as Grandpa (Lionel Barrymore).  He’s at a bank, and he’s chatting with the teller, Mr. Poppins, a nervous little man who doesn’t particularly like his job.  He’d much rather tinker and make ingenious gadgets.  So Grandpa invites him to leave the bank and come and live at his house.  At Grandpa’s house, everybody does what he wants to do – learn ballet, write plays, concoct fireworks, play the harmonica, do acrobatics, whatever.
     “But how would I live?” asks the teller.
     “The same way we do.”
     “The same way.  Well, who takes care of you?”
     “The same One,” says Grandpa, “that takes care of the lilies of the field, Mr. Poppins, except that we toil a little, spin a little, and have a lot of fun.”
     That scene comes from Frank Capra’s uproarious romantic comedy, You Can’t Take It With You (1938), which is also a shrewd commentary upon how people end up living lives they don’t like, because they’re motivated by ambition, avarice, or fear.  Those things sell! 
     The setup of the plot is simple enough.  The young Tony Kirby (Jimmy Stewart), son of a ruthless and ulcer-ridden tycoon (Edward Arnold), has fallen in love with a young woman (Jean Arthur) who happens to be the granddaughter of that same old and quirky fellow, and whose house is the sole remaining property on a block that the elder Kirby wants to buy up and turn into a huge factory complex.  But old Grandpa Vanderhof won’t sell.  And for some time, nobody but we who watch the film knows who is related to whom, and that there’s going to be a problem with that property on one side, with all the added force of upper class snobbery, and love on the other side, with a way of life mostly free from the preoccupations of the rich and of those who desperately want to become rich.
     Scene after scene will challenge you to ask questions like, “Well, why don’t we live like that? Why don’t we live in a place where little kids with an accordion and a flair for dancing can roam the streets at night and teach strangers how to dance ‘The Big Apple,’ for ten cents a pop?  And yell ‘Cheese it, the cops!’ and run off – without any harm done?  What do we take with us when we die?  Why are we not aiming for love and marriage, more than anything else?  Why are our Sundays more and more like Monday, instead of our Mondays being more like the feast of Sunday?”
     Enjoy it – a few tears, a lot of laughs, and some healthy thinking, too!