Greatest Best Picture of All Time: Old Hollywood, Round 3

After a short foray into the 21st century, I'm bouncing back to the "Old Hollywood" section of my bracket.

For round 3, we had to pit You Can't Take It with You (1938) vs. Casablanca (1942.)

First Contestant: You Can't Take It With You

Nowadays, if you mention the name Frank Capra, you mostly get blank stares. He is remembered, when he's remembered at all, for It's a Wonderful Life, the 1946 anti-materialist movie that starred Jimmy Stewart, Lionel Barrymore, and Jimmy the Raven. It's a Wonderful Life won no awards, flopped at the box office, lapsed into public domain, and became a Christmas classic because stingy networks would slap it on the schedule every December.

Eight years before directing that masterpiece, however, Capra directed a different movie with anti-materialist themes, also starring Stewart, Barrymore, and Raven. That was You Can't Take It With You, which won Best Picture of 1938, and has since been almost completely forgotten.

Isn't history weird?

The Plot
Adapted from a play by the same name, You Can't Take It With You is a screwball comedy about a family that values fun over money. They live, as Grandpa (Barrymore) puts it, "Like the lilies of the field." Their household consists of:

• Grandpa Martin Vanderhof, who owns the house
• Penny Sycamore, his daughter
• Paul Sycamore, her husband
• Alice Sycamore, their daughter
• Essie Carmichael, their other daughter
• Ed Carmichael, her husband
• Kolenkhov, Essie's dance teacher
• DePinna, who delivered ice to their house some years ago and stuck around
• Poppins, an accountant who quit his job after a pep talk from Grandpa
• Rheba, their housekeeper
• Donald, her boyfriend, who is "on relief" (aka unemployment)
• Jimmy the Raven, who is there for no apparent reason

The film doesn't tell us what they live on, but it shows us they live chaotically and with lots of fun.

And also a trained raven.

Soon, however, they face a culture clash. Alice has fallen in love with Tony Kirby (Stewart), the son of a prominent banker and businessman. The Kirbys are everything that the Vanderhof/Sycamore/Carmichael clan is not: rich, status-obsessed, and mean. Tony feels trapped by his family's stuffy expectations and admires Alice's loving environment. Alice, however, believes that the Kirbys will never like her family as they are.

To complicate matters, Anthony Kirby Sr. has been buying up land in the Vanderhof's neighborhood, intending to evict everyone and build a factory. Grandpa is the last owner who's refusing to sell.

The meet-the-parents dinner party starts with this:

...and ends with the police arresting everybody - Kirbys included!

This is where the tone of the film takes an abrupt swerve for the dramatic. In a holding cell, Grandpa Vanderhof gives Kirby pere a verbal dressing-down he'll never forget.

"What makes you think you're such a superior human being? Your money? If you do, you're a dull-witted fool, Mr. Kirby. And a poor one at that. You're poorer than any of these people you call scum, because I'll guarantee at least they've got some friends....You may be a high mogul to yourself, Mr. Kirby, but to me you're a failure - failure as a man, failure as a human being, even a failure as a father. When your time comes, I doubt if a single tear will be shed over you. The world will probably cry, 'Good riddance.' That's a nice prospect, Mr. Kirby. I hope you'll enjoy it. I hope you'll get some comfort out of all this coin you've been sweating over then!"

Then, when they're arraigned in night court, the gallery is full of Grandpa's friends and neighbors. When the judge levies a fine for the disturbance of the peace and unlicensed manufacture of fireworks, the whole room passes the hat to pay it on behalf of the family.

I could put a video clip here, but frankly, you can just picture the end of It's a Wonderful Life.

Naturally, Mr. Kirby has a change of heart. He abandons the plan to demolish the neighborhood, encourages Tony and Alice to stay together, and sits down with Grandpa to play the harmonica. The whole affair ends with Grandpa saying grace:

Second Contestant: Casablanca

I believe that our second contestant needs very little introduction. I base this on the fact that when the American Film Institute set out to list the 100 most memorable movie quotes, 6% of them came from Casablanca. It's so influential, in fact, that I recently used its final scene as a teaching aid in an English class.

The Plot

People from Europe are trying to get to America because World War II is happening. Casablanca, which is now in Morocco but was then in Vichy France, is full of refugees. Surprisingly, there are still a few people devoted to ignoring the war's existence, including American-expat-turned-cafè-manager Rick and Captain Louis Renault of the French police. Rick has obtained a MacGuffin that will allow 2 people to leave Casablanca without additional authorization. Right on cue, his ex-girlfriend Ilsa turns up with her husband, Victor Laszlo, in tow. Laszlo is a person of some importance in the Czech resistance, and the Nazis would very much like to arrest him.

Since it was made during the war, there are also several scenes designed to make the audience feel more hopeful about Allied victory. For instance:

Will Rick a) run away with Ilsa, or b) help Victor get out? Is Louis a) one lazy Nazi sympathizer, or b) one lazy French patriot? Why are the French cafè patrons so excited to sing "La Marseillaise" over the sound of Nazis singing a marching song from the Franco-Prussian War?

77-year-old spoiler alert: B; B; and the Nazis were supposed to be singing their anthem, but couldn't because it was still under copyright protection in the U.S.

In the end, Rick decides to get off the war's sidelines and actively help the good guys. He starts by kidnapping Captain Renault, dumping Ilsa, and shooting the German commandant, all of which seems quite heroic in context.

He and Louis then run off to join a Free French Brigade, in a scene that led one of my Russian-born students to ask, "Won't he be in trouble later because he helped the Nazis?" Which is a good question, but not one the film can answer.

Our Winner: A Tie

Bryan voted for contestant #1, on the grounds that it made us laugh. I, however, lobbied hard for contestant #2, because I love the scene with La Marseillaise. As a compromise, I painstakingly re-created the whole bracket in Excel and made a separate copy for each of us.

Bryan's Bracket

Claire's Bracket

Attention employers: This is exactly what I mean when I say I have Excel skills.