Not Rated| 2 h 6 min | Drama, Comedy | 1938
Grandpa Vanderhof’s (Lionel Barrymore) eccentric household is the only one in downtown Depression-era New York resisting Anthony Kirby’s (Edward Arnold) business ambitions. Kirby wants a moat of unencumbered land around his munitions business, even if it runs his rivals aground. But Vanderhof won’t sell a house that reminds him of his long-dead wife.
Kirby’s idealistic, less worldly son Tony (James Stewart), indifferent to this context, falls for Vanderhof’s granddaughter Alice (Jean Arthur). This puts their families on a collision course that challenges Kirby to rethink his priorities, and Alice to negotiate fears that her visibly plebeian status will keep Tony from marrying her.
Like many of Frank Capra’s films, this one dwells on class consciousness and what it means to be truly wealthy. Based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, his romantic comedy reinforces why family and friends matter more than the status that money and estate bring.
Capra’s storyline is over the top. Many scenes are fanciful rather than funny. But it’s all strung engagingly around two delightfully contrasting families.
The snooty Kirbys eye more wealth and influence even at the expense of impoverished families. The Vanderhofs are bent on milking joy out of the everyday and sharing that with others, impoverished or not. Tony, torn between the two families, must decide which he’ll emulate, what kind of son, husband, and father he’d like to be.
Vanderhof recalls Abe Lincoln’s line “With malice toward none, with charity for all,” but moans that nowadays if someone doesn’t agree with you, they’re willing to “bomb the daylights out of you.” Vanderhof doesn’t mind people failing, as long as they’re trying their best and enjoying the journey, which could be writing a book, painting, ballet-dancing, or playing a musical instrument. To him and his family, money is incidental.
Humane Characters
With a tighter script the film might have showcased the interiority of a few vital characters, instead of offering a snapshot of too many. Still, it packs enough to make you care.Haltingly at one point, Tony starts to speak, “I used to be able to talk to you, Dad, but lately…” then trails off as Kirby wistfully weighs his imagined success as a businessman against his real failure as a father.
Capra often described how he relished giving even seemingly insignificant supporting actors a backstory, so they could feel that everything they said or did on set mattered. Here his actors are believable no matter how improbable their actions are: playing the harmonica amid a crisis, practicing wrestling moves before dinner, railing about rats at a cocktail dinner, joining an impromptu dance with children in a park, or testing fireworks in the house basement.
She’s so endearingly inept at her dance moves here that no one would mistake Vanderhof’s granddaughter Essie (Ann Miller) for a ballet dancer. But they’d laughingly admit that she’s a more than willing student. Miller was 15 years old at the time.
The other Jimmy in the film (the raven), flitting from someone’s hand to someone else’s shoulder, completes the portrait of the idiosyncratic Vanderhof household.
Crippled by arthritis, Barrymore so loved the part of Grandpa, he told producers to fit him in somehow, with crutches if necessary. They did.
Capra cast debutant Dub Taylor as the quixotic grandson-in-law of Vanderhof, not only because he could play the xylophone required for the part, but also because of his sunny charm. When Taylor was in a rough patch and his wife about to deliver a baby well before official shooting started, Capra paid a salary for him to take otherwise redundant “xylophone lessons” (!) just so that he could earn a bit.
Perhaps, Capra’s actors lived his overriding theme—there’s more to life than money—so credibly on screen because he himself lived it so credibly off screen.
