You Can't Take it With You (1938)

Written by Robert Riskin

Directed by Frank Capra

Where earlier in this marathon, I made the discovery that I really liked the odd-numbered films and intensely disliked the even-numbered ones, as we enter our double digits, I’ve discovered that line becoming blurred. While I wasn’t the biggest fan of The Life of Emile Zola, I liked it enough to score it in the B range. And now, with You Can’t Take it With You, I find the rating sliding in the opposite direction.

Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur as the young lovers

This is the first film on this list that I felt I could genuinely say I was more than glancingly knowledgeable about its source material. I’d seen the play on which the film is based back in college, so I remembered little bits and pieces of the plot (mostly about an eccentric family and the boy from a “normal” family who falls in love with one of them).

Shenanigans within the Sycamore family

You can imagine my surprise at all the other plots that I seem to have forgotten about, such as a greedy corporation trying to buy the house to demolish it, or everyone in the family being arrested at one point. I think this led to my first aspect of disappointment in the film: it’s a comedy, but it wasn’t funny. There’s lots of comedic humor to be found in a family such as the Sycamore family, but it’s barely touched on, save for a moment in which the family is surprised by the family of James Stewart, who is madly in love with Alice Sycamore. That sequence played like an early version of The Birdcage (without the LGBT+ angle), but never really went for good laughs. As I noted in It Happened One Night, perhaps this is just due to the change in sensibilities in the intervening decades, but it’s hard to know for sure.

Lionel Barrymore as the patriarch of the Sycamore family

An interesting note, now that I bring it up: this film, and It Happened One Night, share the same writer and director. Frank Capra seems to struggle here with his usual MO: a Capra film usually makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside; they’re chock full of nostalgia. This film never really quite gets there...it has some sentimentality, but overall, it plays like a straight story.

The performances in the film are definitely great to look at, especially the various members of the Sycamore house. Leading the tribe is Lionel Barrymore, who delivers an excellent performance. Indeed, he has an exquisite monologue about the main message of the film: greed gets you nothing; in the end, you can’t take it with you. That really is a great message, even beyond the scope of the film. We slave away day after day...we spend our money on things...objects. But, we can’t take it with us.

Despite this lovely message, the film is just boring. There’s little humor, little drama, little...anything, really. It’s a pitch of a story dragged over two hours, with some gems of performances shining through.

FINAL GRADE: C-