You Can't Take It With You (Columbia). When the play from which this picture was derived opened in Manhattan in December 1936, critics complained that Playwrights George Kaufman and Moss Hart had failed to equip it with plot, that their eccentric characters were freaks rather than human beings. Translation from the stage to cinema sometimes has extraordinary results. In this case, the result is spectacular proof that the comic exterior of You Can't Take It With You concealed not merely plot but superb dramatic conflict, and that its characters, far from being freaks, were really human beings drawn on the heroic scale. Brilliantly explored by Writer Robert Riskin, Director Frank Capra and the season's most astutely chosen cast, these unforeseen potentialities make the Pulitzer Prize-winning play of 1937 into what is easily the No. 1 cinema comedy of 1938.
Most titanic rebel in the group of legendary rebels which You Can't Take It With You assembles in the living room of a shabby urban household is Grandpa Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore), retired for 35 years because he decided one morning 'that working was no fun. His daughter, Penny Sycamore (Spring Byington). writes plays because someone once delivered a typewriter to the house by mistake; his son-in-law (Samuel Hinds) manufactures fireworks in the basement; his granddaughter, Essie (Ann Miller), studies ballet with a ferociously impecunious Russian (Mischa Auer); and the assorted camp followers of the Vanderhpf-Sycamore menage pass their time playing the xylophone, experimenting with false faces and training pet birds. Thus when Alice Sycamore (Jean Arthur), the only member of the family normal enough to work for a living, falls in love with her boss (James Stewart), scion of the fabulously rich and conventional Anthony P. Kirbys, it occasions not only a meeting between the two clans but a Homeric clash of creeds.
In the play, the climax of the clash, like all the rest of the action, occurred in the Vanderhof living room, where the Kirbys, arriving the night before they had been invited for dinner, were just in time to be carted off to jail when the fireworks in the basement exploded prematurely. Unimpeded by the restrictions of the stage, the camera follows the party to jail, then into court, then into the newspapers, then into a board meeting at the Kirby bank in a series of scenes which lifts the feud between the Kirbys and the Vanderhofs to the plane of that between the Montagues and Capulets. By the time Grandpa Vanderhof and Banker Kirby (Edward Arnold) eventually symbolize their inevitable meeting of minds by sitting down together to play Polly-Woily-Doodle on harmonicas. their duet affords some of the emotional impact of a Beethoven symphony.