You Can’t Take It with You — But You Can Laugh All the Way
We had an unusual situation here in the prodigious arts and theatre metropolis of little Grove City, Pennsylvania. For the first time ever, our talented theatre programs/directors at both Grove City College and Grove City Christian Academy chose the same play to perform this spring. It was pure coincidence, and a blessed one at that. Both chose the classic You Can’t Take It with You.
For my family, the choice was wonderful, heaven-sent. The 1936 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. We had never seen the play, but several times we watched the terrific 1938 film adaptation by the great Frank Capra. My youngest daughter, who likes to act as well as dance, and had some training in ballet, loved the character “Essie,” an aspiring ballerina who’s bubble-headed and a bit clumsy. Capra described Essie as having “the brain of a butterfly that flitted on its toes.” My daughter often talked about how much she wanted to play that role, if such a situation ever somehow presented itself. She pretty much came out of the womb ready for that role. Like Essie herself, she would often spin around our crazy, eccentric house — which, like the house in the movie, is often teeming with people and guests and silly characters — and pirouette and point and stretch and walk on her toes and do all the ballerina stuff in a cute, endearing way.
Well, lo and behold, this year, the first in which my daughter was eligible to be in the school play, You Can’t Take It with You, was selected, and Essie was open. She got the part, and she was splendid. The tricky decision for her and the director was to what extent she should portray Essie in a clumsy or graceful way. They opted for an entertaining, inspired combination of the two. In the Capra film rendition, the accomplished Hollywood dancer Ann Miller did the same.
Aside from the Essie character, the entire production is loaded with colorful characters and is hilariously fun. It’s one of the most entertaining couple of hours you’ll ever see on stage, especially when the performers are up to snuff. And among the young folks in our Grove City community, they most certainly were — and then some. I’m amazed at the ability of these kids.
All of which compels me here to do something I’ve long wanted to do: remember and commend the 1938 Capra classic. (READ: “It’s a Wonderful Film—Yes, the Best Ever.”)
The Kaufman-Hart play debuted in late 1936, first in Philadelphia and then quickly on Broadway, getting rave reviews. It caught the attention of Hollywood instantly. Frank Capra himself glimpsed the first act at New York’s packed Booth Theater. He jumped at the film rights. At that point, Capra had done smash hits like It Happened One Night (Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert) and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Gary Cooper). He would win his third Academy Award for You Can’t Take It with You. Kudos, too, to the brilliant script by Robert Riskin, Capra’s frequent collaborator.
In his memoirs, Capra described the plot of You Can’t Take It with You this way: “The show was about a happy-go-lucky family of rebels — and some outsiders who joined them as ‘family’ — living in perfect concord, finding happiness in individual expression: doing the things they had always wanted to do, even though they did them badly.” Capra marveled at how this “heterogeneous group of ‘happies’ found the courage to do what most Americans secretly wished they could do.” Led by the example of their jovial patriarch, the grandfather played the legendary Lionel Barrymore, they had sought to “escape from the modern rat-race which pressured the average American into a lifetime of accumulating wealth and living standards he could never take with him.”
“What the world’s churches were preaching to apathetic congregations, my universal language of film might say more entertainingly to movie audiences.”
Beyond that message and the laughs, Capra discerned in the play “something deeper, something greater.” He saw in You Can’t Take It with You “a golden opportunity to dramatize Love Thy Neighbor in living drama. What the world’s churches were preaching to apathetic congregations, my universal language of film might say more entertainingly to movie audiences.”
Boy, did it ever. And with perfect casting. Aside from Barrymore, who in this film was the total opposite of the mean, villainous “Mr. Potter” that he portrayed superbly in Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, there were Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur as the guy-girl love interests, Edward Arnold as the bad businessman (“Mr. Anthony P. Kirby Sr.”) who in the end turns out to be “a pretty good egg after all” (in the words of “Grandpa”), Spring Byington as the air-headed mother, and a uproarious group of secondary characters, including the dour, anti-Bolshevik Russian “Boris Kolenkhov,” who declared of practically everything, “It stinks!”
Byington’s character, “Penny Sycamore,” embodies their carefree attitudes. While Essie spends her time merrily prancing about the room, Penny spends her time merrily banging keys on a typewriter, constructing nonsensical, unfinished, unpublished book manuscripts. Why is she writing? For this simple reason: Because a deliveryman mistakenly brought a typewriter to the house eight years earlier. So, why not?
In one especially funny exchange, Penny, described by Capra as the “pixie, moonstruck mother,” innocently busts on Mr. Kirby’s stuffy, snobbish wife for embracing the dark trend of occultism/spiritualism, telling her it’s silly nonsense: “Oh, Mrs. Kirby! Everyone knows that’s a fake.” Mrs. Kirby is highly offended, but Penny is too innocent and lackadaisical to even realize she’s offending anyone.
In a line that’s pure Frank Capra, Grandpa urges people to instead adopt good old-fashioned “Americanism.”
Speaking of “isms,” there’s a tremendous soliloquy in the film when Grandpa calmly goes off on the various toxic “isms” of the day, from communism to fascism to voodooism, lamenting to Penny that “everyone has an ‘ism’ these days.” In a line that’s pure Frank Capra, Grandpa urges people to instead adopt good old-fashioned “Americanism.”
It’s a wonderful moment.
Grandpa also deliciously roasts the federal income tax, which had been implemented in America only two decades prior, and which Franklin Delano Roosevelt had jacked up to an obscene level — 90 percent-plus on upper incomes. Capra himself despised the tax, and he didn’t like FDR either. In his memoirs, Capra, a conservative Republican, consistently shared with readers how little he made from his movies because the vast majority of his earnings went directly to Washington, D.C. To note just one example, his first royalty check for the 1944 Arsenic and Old Lace was $232,000, of which he retained only $27,000. Yes, $205,000 went to federal and state income taxes. Those were the criminal tax rates of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
You Can’t Take It with You is filled with funny moments — too many to reprise here. There is not a wasted line. My tribute here really can’t do it justice. I strongly recommend it to anyone, and especially to young families. It delivers a meaningful moral message about what matters most in life and what you can and can’t take with you.
READ MORE from Paul Kengor:
Carrying the Cross This Holy Week
Pope Leo on Peace, War, and Conscience
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