When a an expensive fur coat falls on her head, Mary Smith’s life of scraping together enough for food and rent turns upside down. She suddenly finds herself in a world of wealth, as she’s mistakenly perceived of as the mistress of Wall Street banker and tycoon, J.B. Ball.
Easy living was never so hard — or muddled and funny.
Last night TCM ran Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You and while I had the same response as what follows below — this is a very chaotic and cacophonous movie — this time I adapted to it better and noticed just how good Edward Arnold is in it. Though an ensemble piece, this is really his movie.
Capra is the kind of director people either really love or really hate. I lean more to the former but I do understand the feelings of the latter. He can be a bit much with his moralizing and sentimentality. In this case, it wasn’t those elements I found off-putting. It was the bedlam.
You Can’t Take It With You (1938)Directed by Frank Capra
Sometimes you can have all the right elements but they somehow don’t quite gel. This is the case with Frank Capra’s 1938 You Can’t Take It With You.
It has all the Capra elements, has the Capra touch, and even has Capra stalwarts like Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur, Lionel Barrymore and Edward Arnold. But it doesn’t quite work. (This was Stewart’s first movie with Frank Capra.)
I think it’s because it tries too hard. It’s almost as if the movie senses something missing and therefore tries to mask it by pushing too much.
Jean Arthur plays the relatively level-headed member of a family of free-spirited oddballs, the Sycamores. At the head of their family is Grandpa, played by Lionel Barrymore, a man who long ago gave up the competitive rat-race most people are committed to in order to do whatever he feels like doing.
Everyone in the family follows his credo – they all do whatever makes them happy. The household is therefore chaotic – one daughter dances through the rooms, Arthur’s mother writes plays, someone’s husband makes music, while others make fireworks in the basement.
The household is wild and noisy.
Jean Arthur, the only family member who appears to actually work, meets Tony Kirby, played by Jimmy Stewart. They fall in love and want to marry. But Tony is the slightly rebellious son of parents who are straight-laced.
His father, Anthony P. Kirby (Edward Arnold) has little interest in anything other than making money. He’s the anti-thesis of the Sycamore’s Grandpa. His mother, Mrs. Anthony Kirby (Mary Forbes) is a social snob.
And that’s the film’s conflict and the source of its humour. The story is of how the Sycamore’s, who believe “you can’t take it with you,” win over the Kirby’s. (Well, Grandpa wins them over.)
It’s very much a Capra theme and is played out in very Capra style.
But it doesn’t work well. The scenes in the Sycamore household are simply too excessive.
The movie tries too hard to make in chaotic and they become more annoying than amusing. The movie is also too long for the material. The main joke, the free-wheeling Sycamores, wears out quickly.
And while the lead performers are all very good, the supporting cast is a bit weak – less because of their performances than by the fact they have little to do except run around making noise.
At best, the movie is only mildly entertaining, mildly funny. However, given the other movies Frank Capra was making around this time, he can be forgiven for having one that falls a bit flat.
And now, having said all that and having watched it again last night (February, 2011), I should point out how good Edward Arnold is in this movie. Really, the movie is all about his character. Scrooge-like (and a bit George Bailey-like), his character is the one that changes and it is his change that is at the heart of the movie. I found Arnold marvelous in this movie, very natural and also extremely funny at points (like the scene at the Sycamore’s home when he keeps sitting down in the awkward chair).
I liked the movie more this time but still feel it is a bit weak. But it’s worth it to see Edward Arnold.
I wrote the bit below about 8 to 10 years ago after seeing Shane for the first time. It’s strictly a gut response and an attempt to figure out that gut response. But I think it may be time for me to re-watch this movie and see if I still have the same reaction or if I can finally see what many others see in the movie.
Shane (1953)Directed by George Stevens
I’ve never seen Shane before. I haven’t discussed it in a film studies class. I haven’t spent hours in bars or cafes talking about it. I just like westerns, knew it was considered one of the best, and finally decided to watch it. So my reaction to it is, in many ways, fresh and not particularly tainted by what others think of it.
Gut response? I was a bit bored. But I’m not so sure it’s a fault of the movie so much as it’s a problem that the film’s sensibilities are of a time when they were not as frenetic as they are now. People were a bit more open to a more leisurely pace.
On the other hand, some of the problems were not just sensibility and the film’s tempo. Shane suffers, I think, from being a little too self-conscious. It’s a little too aware of the western genre, of its place in it, and of its purpose, which is too comment on the genre and film violence.
Unfortunately for someone from my generation, the story of Shane is one we’re too familiar with from it’s recapitulations, especially the Clint Eastwood films like High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider. Alan Ladd as Shane, despite director George Stevens’ efforts, is a little too clean, a little too smooth shaven. He’s not harsh enough. I’m not sure this is a flaw with the film so much as it’s a flaw with seeing it from a distance in time.
Shane arrives at a Wyoming homestead as a drifter. He stays for a while with people who are oppressed by cattlemen trying to take over their land. He is distant but suggests strength. Men and women admire and respect him, children hero-worship him. Eventually troubles with the cattlemen come to a head and it is Shane who faces them down.
Of course, there is a helluva lot more to it than that. But that’s the basic premise. It’s the western model Eastwood used many times. The film is self-consciously rooted in a myth and wants to comment on it. It especially wants to comment on violence.
The result is a lot of time spent on creating the non-violent world represented by Marion (Jean Arthur) and her husband-farmer played by Van Heflin. (He, by the way, is absolutely perfect in this role; his performance is nothing less than great.)
Unfortunately, the family life, the life of hard work, is not particularly interesting. To appreciate the value of this kind of life you have to live it. To watch it is to go to sleep.
We get to see Shane watching this life, and see his longing for it (an essential element in the film) but again, it’s a bit of a snooze. It’s one of the hardest tasks an artist can set him or herself: to make the lives of nice people interesting for an audience. It is seldom done successfully.
Meanwhile, we are constantly aware that eventually Shane must draw his gun and the big showdown must come. But it takes forever. There are legitimate reasons for why it takes so long, and you can appreciate what George Stevens is trying to do, but … it takes so damn long! And the film is so restrained.
This is all just gut reaction but I really think Shane falls short primarily for one reason: it’s a movie for the intellect and not for the gonads. Westerns are meat-and-potatoes films. They are best when they’re simple. They’re best when they follow formulas. They are best when they tell you things that are true viscerally, not via the brain.
(Note: This review was written back around 2003. It was my initial response to my first viewing of the movie.)
After having it on my computer for about two months in a half-finished state, I’ve finally posted my take on A Lady Takes a Chance (1943). It stars Jean Arthur and John Wayne and, yes, it’s a romantic comedy.
It’s not, however, the best romantic comedy. It’s pretty mediocre. However, both Arthur and Wayne are wonderful, each in their own way.
If you are a fan of either actor, you should see this one. The film, as a whole, is pleasant but not anything that would have change the world of cinema. My review can be found here.
I watched and wrote a review of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington the other day. After writing and posting the review I discovered that I had already written a review of it back in 2002. And here’s the thing: the first was a helluva lot better than the one I had just written.
On the other hand, the new review did help me realize I wanted to write something about Jean Arthur (this is not the post). I absolutely love her. Yes, it’s partly due to her squeaky voice that has a “cute” quality to it that you can’t resist. However, it’s also because I think she was a pretty darned good actor, particularly as a comedic actor.
Many of her movies are among my favourites like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can’t Take it With You and Only Angels Have Wings. (Look who she worked with: Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper and Cary Grant!) To learn a little bit about her, have a look at the bio on IMDb.
I don’t really like the term “appreciation” but I suppose that is what I hope to write. Before that, though, I hope to learn a bit more about her by picking up John Oller’s biography of her from about ten years ago, Jean Arthur: The Actress Nobody Knew.
By the way, one of the initiating factors in my watching and collecting of older movies was Jean Arthur. Sometime around 2000 or 2001 a series of DVDs were released under the heading Columbia Classics. Movies like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Only Angels Have Wings were among them and they are what got me interested in Jean Arthur.
