The Movie You Can't Take It With You

You Can't Take It with You, which I watched on DVD yesterday, was a successful Broadway play, adapted to screen in 1938 and directed by Frank Capra.  It starred Lionel Barrymore, Jimmy Stewart, and Jean Arthur and garnered the Best Picture Academy Award for that year.  The setting is Manhattan in New York with two families, the rich banking Kirbys and the eccentric Vanderhofs...headed by elderly Martin Vanderhof (Barrymore)...vying for control of a small, strategically located city block.  The Kirby firm's young vice-president Tony (Stewart) has fallen in love with his secretary Alice (Arthur), who happens to be Martin's granddaughter and lives with him in their big house, along with her other sister (and her husband), her mother and father, and two friends invited to stay with them.  Each resident is encouraged to engage in their own personally fulfilling projects, no matter how silly they seem or how much (or little talent) they have...a direct challenge to the "push-push-push" mindset characteristic of the dominant rat-race culture exemplified by the Kirbys.  A culture clash between the two families in inevitable and it unfolds in great comedic form.  It's clear that the Vanderhof way of life is the preferred way and that folks like the Kirbys need to just pick up a harmonica and play along, abandoning their pointless pursuit of worldly wealth: after all, you "can't take it with you".  Although the Vanderhof philosophy of "doing your own thing" is tempting...and I follow it to an extent...I also believe in paying my taxes and see going to work in itself as good, too.  Even Martin Vanderhof employed a couple for housekeeping and cooking at their home: these two weren't in a position to just stay at home and collect stamps.  I thought the movie was great, but I first saw You Can't Take It with You on TV in a PBS Great Performances Broadway show in the 1980s starring Jason Robards as Martin Vanderhof...he was remarkable.  As for Frank Capra, who directed several memorable movies of that bygone era, my first exposure to his work curiously wasn't with feature length movies, but with the Bell Science films we used to watch in elementary school during the late 1960s...my favorite one that Capra directed was The Strange Case of the Cosmic Ray.  Going back to You Can't Take It with You, I guess the main thing I got from it is that you have to be true to yourself and not let your life become submerged and dominated by others...