YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU: Blu-ray (Columbia, 1938) Sony Home Entertainment
BEST PICTURE -
1938
Director, Frank
Capra topped off a decade’s worth of exploring threads for the common man with You Can’t Take It With You (1938); his
revisionist take on a 1936 Broadway dazzler, co-written by George S. Kaufman
and Moss Hart. The play, an instant smash hit, would continue to 838
performances, running concurrently with the movie; a decidedly different
experience altogether. Alas, the movie’s premiere was preceded by a modicum of
bad blood between Capra and Columbia Studio president, Harry Cohn; a genuine
pity too, since Capra’s association with the studio had elevated Columbia’s
status from B-grade poverty row to A-list minor competitor to rival the likes
of MGM, Warner Bros. and 2oth Century-Fox. While these other leviathans flooded
the market with their myriad of treasures from a seemingly bottomless wellspring
of homegrown talent, Columbia’s good fortunes teetered - almost precariously –
on the fate of the next Capra picture. Cohn undeniably knew the strength of
Capra’s drawing power at the box office; enough to pilfer and slap his name
onto the press and promotion of other Columbia pictures marketed abroad;
pictures Capra had absolutely no part in making. Tantamount to fraud, Cohn
might have sneaked off without incident, if only Capra had not taken his family
on vacation to Britain in the fall of 1936, immediately following the
lackluster box office returns on Lost
Horizon (1936) his one departure from what had, by 1938, become something
of a formula, affectionately labeled ‘Capra-corn’,
his profit-driving recipe for success.
But in Britain,
Capra was informed by one of the distributors that his ‘latest’ picture – If You Could Only Cook (1935) was
proving something of a disappointment. As Capra knew nothing of the picture
(actually directed by William A. Seiter), he immediately telephoned Harry Cohn
to make his inquiries and voice his displeasure. Capra had endured much under Cohn’s tyranny,
but this was the proverbial straw to break the camel’s back. To say Lost Horizon had drained virtually
every ounce of Capra’s creative energy is a bit much. Yet, there is little to
deny the making of Columbia’s most ambitious and costly picture to date had
been more than trying on Capra’s patience, generating considerable friction and
animosity between him and Cohn. While Lost
Horizon remains an irrefutable masterpiece, it was decidedly ahead of its time;
its formidable scale-tipping budget, coupled with Cohn’s chronic meddling on
Capra’s final edit, resulted in a very unpleasant work experience all around.
And the picture’s inability to recoup its outlay did not sweeten Cohn on
green-lighting Capra’s other pet project: a bio-pic about Frédéric Chopin. Repeatedly stalled, Cohn would eventually put
his foot down and cancel it outright. Still, Cohn’s faith in Capra remained unshaken.
As here was an artist who could seemingly turn lead into gold. Capra’s
impressive string of hits throughout the 1930’s had afforded him unprecedented
autonomy. And Capra, having already been to the theater and fallen under the
spell of You Can’t Take It With You,
was as eager to direct a movie version of it. But now, the rift over Cohn’s
exploitation of Capra’s name on other movies released in the foreign markets,
simply to sell them to distributors under a false pretext, had incredibly
soured Capra on ever trusting Harry Cohn again. In fact, Capra would not stand
for it. He immediately demanded a release from his Columbia contract.
In these days of
indentured servitude, breaking a studio contract was virtually impossible. Each
man believing the law was on his side, neither Cohn nor Capra budged; Cohn,
insisting Capra would finish out the terms of his contract with two more
pictures. But Cohn had underestimated Capra’s resolve. Capra sued Columbia for
breach of contract; Cohn and his high-priced attorneys successfully delaying
the inevitable by getting a judge to change the venue no less than three times;
first, from Hollywood to New York; then, from New York to London, England.
Although frustrated by this stalemate, and unable to work anywhere else in
Hollywood while the details were being ironed out, Capra nevertheless held
steadfast to his principles. Eventually, the inevitable could no longer be
denied. Capra was right. What Cohn had perpetuated was fraud. The only way out
was to get Capra to drop his lawsuit. Arriving at Capra’s home in what Frank
Capra Jr. would later describe as ‘the
longest limousine you’ve ever seen’, Cohn first employed intimidation
tactics to get Capra to back down. When these failed to be persuasive, Cohn
reverted to tearful repentance, throwing himself at Capra’s mercy, and
appealing to the director’s sense of fair play. After all, in as much as Capra
had made Columbia a lot of money and elevated its prestige within the industry,
none of it would have been possible without Cohn’s support and belief in his
talents. Exactly how much of Capra’s stubbornness in withstanding Cohn was
Capra’s own positioning to gain even greater autonomy at Columbia remains open
for debate. What is for certain is Capra made only two more pictures for
Columbia after dropping his lawsuit; the two, necessary to round out his
contract, before leaving Cohn and Columbia for good to pursue other avenues and
dreams.
The first of
this two-picture commitment was You
Can’t Take It With You – an infinitely smoother 58 day shoot, firmly
establishing James Stewart as a star of the first magnitude and leading to a
life-long friendship between Stewart and Capra, resulting in two more memorable
screen outings; 1939’s Mr. Smith Goes To
Washington, and 1946’s It’s A
Wonderful Life. It is interesting to
note one of the familiar threads running through Capra’s body of work is his
overriding contempt for wealthy authority figures – always depicted as miserly,
corrupt and a threat to the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness. And although Capra’s compassion for the common man would be
misinterpreted as favoring a communist slant, he was never indicted by HUAC for
these predilections. Toiling with his favorite screenwriter, Robert Riskin
(regrettably, the last of their collaborations) the cinematic incarnation of You Can’t Take It With You allows Capra
his greatest latitude to rail against America’s particular brand of classicism;
pitting the shy and retiring ‘every man’,
about to be stomped upon by millionaire ‘fat
cats’ for the sake of pure profit.
The play’s focus
is unquestioningly the romantic folly between Tony Kirby, heir apparent to his
father’s industrial fortune, and Alice Sycamore, a congenial worker bee,
heralding from a house of lovable screwballs that, oddly enough, neither work
for a living, nor are supported by any form of governmental assistance to get
by and pursue their dreams. Capra’s film is more directly and telescopically
zeroed in on the classically inspired David vs. Goliath triumph. Indeed, the
third act to his filmic adaptation bears no earthly resemblance to its Broadway
origins. And yet, Capra and Riskin’s revisions neither hamper nor obstruct the
play’s overall impact. Harry Cohn may have bristled over Capra’s cheek at ‘reinventing the wheel’; but this time
the fiery mogul kept his thoughts to himself - mostly. Besides, apart from Lost Horizon’s box office
disappointment, Capra had an unimpeachable record at Columbia. Four of his last
five pictures not only made a ton of money for the studio – along the way
earning a whopping 21 Oscar-nominations (and winning eight) – they had also
elevated Columbia’s prestige within the industry.
With its
Pulitzer Prize-winning pedigree, You
Can’t Take It With You is thematically right up Capra’s alley, returning
him to his favorite milieu: the downtrodden and struggling middle class during
the Great Depression. However, the
picture’s third act is something of a reprieve for ruthless capitalism; a
notion much to do with Capra’s own immigrant experience. Indeed, Capra’s rise to prominence at
Columbia, while swift and seemingly assured, in retrospect had been preceded by
a dark and fallow period in which he struggled to find gainful employment –
even a steady job – at times, almost crippled by his own emasculating
self-doubt for nearly ten long years. Now, at the top of the proverbial food
chain, Capra was humbled by how far he had come, and even more willing to
emphatically point out how nearly impossible his attainment of the American
dream was for many others still slogging it in the daily grind.
Incontrovertibly, Capra’s commiserations are with his common man, precisely
because he had been one. Even after his good fortune had settled in, Capra
never entirely forgot from whence he had cometh. Capra’s message and timing
could not have been more perfect. His pictures struck a chord with
Depression-challenged audiences; his morality and homespun ideals, perfectly in
sync with the paying public’s appetite to see depictions of life as they knew
it on the screen; albeit, with Capra’s inimitable ability to effortlessly move
between the relative severity of the drama and lithe comedy to provide for the
axiomatic ‘happy ending’.
The characters
who inhabit most any Capra movie are usually a cross between the hoity-toity
rich – generally played as misguided figures of fun or growling villains;
either way, in need of a good head-shake (and getting it, as well as their just
deserts in the penultimate showdown) – and ever-so-slight variations on an
archetypal solid, hard-working American dreamer; usually depicted as a bucolic
bumpkin, come to the big city as the proverbial ‘fish out of water’ destined to
have his heart and head matured, but his spirit and blind-eyed optimism never
broken and, in fact, affirmed; Capra always illustrating the infallibility of a
stout-heart, keen mind, and, starry-eyed outlook on life. “Maybe there never was an America,” director, John Cassavetes once
pondered, “Maybe it was all Frank Capra.” Indeed, Capra’s notions of what America was –
and could become with the solidarity of its citizens – had, by 1938, shaped a
generation’s faith in itself. The ‘Capra-esque’ quality retrofitted to most
interpretations of his body of work, speaks to three principles: faith in
humanity at large, conviction in one’s self-reliance, and uncompromising belief
in a brighter future, usually perceived under a guise of flag-waving
patriotism.
Interestingly,
and quite unlike the play, the hero in You
Can’t Take It With You is not leading man – James Stewart’s Tony Kirby, who
cannot even get off his lump to defend the honor of the woman he supposedly
loves until the eleventh hour when others – including the lady in question –
have already spoken up in their own defense. Marginally heroic is Lionel
Barrymore’s Grandpa Martin Vanderhof, whose clear-eyed – if bromidic –
philosophies of living simply often take center stage, both in the comedic and
dramatic portions of the story. Yet, Capra makes an even more unorthodox
decision here; to transform Tony’s boorish industrialist/banker father, Anthony
P. Kirby (magnificently realized by Edward Arnold) from villain to the hero of
the piece in the third act. Confronted thrice with the realization he has
sacrificed familial happiness strictly to acquire more affluence (first by
Grandpa, then by a dying industrialist, Ramsey, played by H.B. Warner, and
finally, his own son’s decision to leave the company to marry the girl he
loves) – Anthony’s purpose in life is shaken to its very core; Capra resolving
that in having given his family everything, Anthony has reduced them all to
nothing beyond their misperceived monetary value.
Edward Arnold is
today sadly underrated among movie legends; a portly, jowl-faced actor with a
face like a tree-full of owls, boosted to overnight stardom via his role as Jim
Brady in 1935’s Diamond Jim (later
reprised for the movie, Lillian Russell,
1940). Arnold’s undeniable specialty was
playing complex rogues and authority figures. Despite being branded ‘box office
poison’ in a scathing article published in Variety in 1938, Arnold worked
steadily throughout his lengthy career – often on two pictures at once –
appearing in more than 150 movies throughout his distinguished career. He was a
favorite of Capra’s, who affords Arnold the best of both worlds in You Can’t Take It With You; his Anthony
Kirby, begun as a self-appointed popinjay of Wall Street, greedy, plotting and
thumbing his nose at even the remotest consideration homespun sentimentality
might outweigh his stern and enterprising prospects; his galvanized resolve
shattered by Grandpa Vanderhof’s prophetic condemnation of his methods and
later, Ramsey’s impassioned declaration about the road to riches also leading a
man to ruin. It is Arnold’s infallible intelligence that allows us past both
his imposing girth and this outward Teutonic tyranny; something behind the eye,
a glint of sadness or even remorse, perhaps, mingling with a more intuitive
understanding seeping into his subconscious. The best moments in Arnold’s
performance are arguably unearthed in his quiet, gradual, though steady and
probing reactions to this humiliation heaped upon his Teflon-coated character
by Grandpa during the courtroom scene, or even better still, as his Anthony
steadily thaws out from his implacably Vathek need to consume everything in his
midst, merely to prove his bullish status as master of all he surveys.
Capra gives us
some hint as to where the accent of this denouement is headed: You Can’t Take It With You, opening
with Anthony Kirby’s arrival at his financial institution flanked by
sycophantic ‘yes men’ fawning and preening in his presence as the undisputed
wolf of Wall Street. Indeed, Kirby can
afford to gloat. His trip to Washington has resulted in a grant to pursue a government-sanctioned
munitions monopoly, guaranteed to quadruple his already sizable wealth. To this
end, Kirby intends on buying up a twelve-block radius around his competitor,
Ramsey’s factory, thus thwarting his plans for expansion and squeeze him out of
the business altogether. One holdout to his plan is Grandpa Vanderhof;
contented to remain in the old neighborhood. Grandpa’s resolve gives the other
residents sincere hope they too can withstand the bullying from Kirby’s
shifty-eyed real estate broker, John Blakely (Clarence Wilson), who has offered
each and every one of them a sizable payout to decamp their premises at once.
Herein, Capra reiterates another inherent difference between the rich and
middle class; Kirby’s ‘loner’ quality pitted against the communal e pluribus
unum of the masses.
Unbeknownst to
Anthony, his son, Tony (James Stewart), whom he has newly appointed VP, has
fallen madly in love with his stenographer, Alice Sycamore (Jean Arthur);
Vanderhof’s granddaughter. In one of too few romantic interludes featured in
the picture, Tony and Alice coo and moon at one another across a desk in
Alice’s office; Meriam Kirby (Mary Forbes) stumbling upon her son’s
flirtations, which she immediately finds distasteful. Tony assures Alice there
is nothing he cannot have if he screams loud enough; a defensive mechanism he
learned as a child. To illustrate this power, Kirby screams at an unsuspecting
page, frightening the poor young man half out of his wits. Meanwhile, in
another part of the Kirby building we meet Grandpa Vanderhof. Almost immediately,
he takes an interest in Mr. Poppins (Donald Meeks), an unprepossessing bean
counter. Poppins is the nervous sort, but fascinated by Vanderhof’s open
invitation to set up shop in his home’s basement to pursue his passion for
making wind-up novelties for children.
We meet the rest
of Vanderhof clan; the effervescent, but scatterbrained Penelope ‘Penny’
Sycamore (Spring Byington), who took up playwriting simply because a typewriter
was accidentally delivered to the house by the U.S. mail service; stern ballet
master, Potap Kolenkhov (Misha Auer) and his atrociously bad pupil, Essie
Carmichael (Ann Miller) and her husband, Ed (Dub Taylor), and, fireworks
inventors, DePinna (Halliwell Hobbes) and Grandpa’s son, Paul (Samuel S. Hind).
Also, in the mix are devoted domestics, Donald (Eddie Rochester Anderson) and
Reba (Lillian Yarbo). As Grandpa has repeatedly refused offers to buy up his
property, Anthony Kirby sends IRS agent, Wilbur G. Henderson (Charles Lane) to
investigate the fact no one living at that address seems to have paid any
personal income tax in a very long while. Confronting Grandpa on the matter,
Henderson is startled when Grandpa defiantly refuses to support the government
in their squandering of his money to indulge in their programs, he neither
supports nor even considers charitable works. “Not with my money!” Grandpa emphatically declares.
Meanwhile, the
youthful romance between Tony and Alice is met with blind-eyed acceptance by
the Sycamores, though decidedly frowned upon by the very snobbish Mrs. Kirby,
who orders her husband to take immediate action against the pending nuptials.
In the meantime, Capra indulges in a bit of playfulness; Tony and Alice caught
unawares by a small group of street-savvy children offering swing lessons for a
quarter in Central Park. Impetuously, Alice accepts the wager and proves a
quick study; Tony, following her cue before a police officer arrives to break
up their party. Alice suggests she can never entertain his impromptu proposal
unless they have the full support of both families. To improve these prospects,
Alice suggests Tony bring his mum and dad over for dinner. Alas, this plan turns rancid when Tony
deliberately brings Anthony and Meriam to the house on the wrong day; the
Sycamores, caught entirely off-guard with the house in total disarray. Penny
attempts to do damage control, as does Alice. But when Anthony suggests in
casual discussion, he was a fairly good wrestler in his youth, Potap decides to
take him up – and pick him up - literally, hoisting and spinning Anthony on his
shoulders, before dropping him to the ground as the rest of the family looks on
in horror. Unharmed, though nevertheless disorientated, Mr. Kirby urges his
wife and son to leave the Sycamores to their particular brand of lunacy; further
threatening to disown Tony should he not forget about marrying into such a
family at once. As far as Anthony is concerned, the Sycamores are crazy.
Unhappy circumstance, this gathering of the clan is interrupted by the police,
who have come to arrest Grandpa for tax evasion; a night’s stay in the drunk
tank is kicked off by DePinna and Paul’s accidental ignition of a whole box of
fireworks, their fire power sending the clan frantically scattering into the
street.
While debating
the finer points of Grandpa’s life philosophy in jail, Kirby makes it known he
thinks himself the better man, largely due to his wealth. Grandpa angrily
points out that only a fool would take solace in embracing pile upon pile of
soulless money. “You can’t take it with
you, Mr. Kirby,” Grandpa points out, “So,
what good is it to you? As near as I can see, the only thing you can take with
you is the love of your friends.” To illustrate this point, Capra and
Riskin have concocted a scene not in the play; the kindly Night Court Judge (Harry
Davenport), willing to pass on the erroneous ‘disturbing the peace’ charge,
quite unable to see his way past the secondary charge; possessing illegal
explosives, and thus fining Grandpa $100 – a sizable sum in 1938. Modestly
ashamed of his behavior, Anthony Kirby instructs his high-handed mouthpiece to
pay the fine; Grandpa turning the offer down flat as his neighborhood friends
rally to get up a collection and pay off the fine themselves as the Judge looks on with sincere admiration.
Alice confronts
Tony in front of the court; declaring she would not marry a man who cannot
stand up and defend her honor – even as it has not been impugned by anything
more than the Kirbys’ prudery. This creates a major tabloid scandal; the
newspaper boys running with the story and inflating it to laughable
proportions. Forced to flee the city in her shame Alice remains absent for some
time, casting a pall on the Sycamores usually happy home. Grandpa elects to
negotiate the sale of his house. The family will move to Connecticut to be
nearer to Alice. Tony arrives to make his apologies. But Penny explains his
intentions are too little too late and asks him to go. The neighborhood
observes as movers begin stripping the Sycamore home of its belongings.
Meanwhile, across town, Anthony prepares to meet with his board of directors
and finalize the merger between his company and the competition, thus creating
a mega-monopoly. However, he is confronted in his board room by Ramsey, the man
he ousted by buying up property surrounding his factory. Passionately, Ramsey
pleads – not for himself, but for Kirby to reconsider where unbridled greed has
taken him; to the brink of self-destruction. Nearly collapsing after his
entreaty, Ramsey leaves the room a dignified man, too late unencumbered by the
hypocrisies of wealth and dying of a massive heart attack off camera a short
while later.
It has all been
for not, it seems, as Tony arrives to inform his father of his resignation from
the company. He has decided his love for Alice means more to him than his seat
as Vice President; a post he neither values nor feels he justly contribute to,
as he does not respect his father’s business practices. Distraught and suddenly
realizing Grandpa was right – he has no friends – Anthony Kirby arrives at the
Vanderhof household as they are preparing to depart. Grandpa takes pity on
Anthony, handing him a harmonica and explaining that whenever times are bleak,
a verse and chorus of ‘Polly-Wolly
Doodle’ seems to set the world right. Although disbelieving in Grandpa’s
naiveté, Anthony has reached the end of his rope and elects to join Grandpa in
this duet. Tony arrives to discover Alice has returned to her family home to
have a final look around the place. The two are reconciled and Anthony informs
everyone he does not intend to evict them from their homes. The scene dissolve
to a tender moment around the dining room table; Grandpa giving the benediction
and thanks, having ‘reached’ the
Kirbys and made them ‘see the light’.
They will become one big happy family from this moment forward.
Harry Cohn had
great faith in Capra’s ability to direct You
Can’t Take It With You, buying the rights to produce it for a whopping
$200,000 (equivalent to roughly $3,292,000 today). And Capra, despite his
misgivings about remaining under Cohn’s thumb for much longer, nevertheless,
dropped his lawsuit to make two of his most highly prized pictures for
Columbia. In later years, Capra would grow somewhat more philosophical about
his approach to making pictures, suggesting “A
hunch is creativity trying to tell you something. I made mistakes in drama. I
thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries. And
scriptwriting is the toughest part of the whole racket…the least understood and
the least noticed. But film is one of the three universal languages, the other
two: mathematics and music.” You
Can’t Take It With You is perfectly cast with a stellar ensemble of
time-honored players and up and comers, of which James Stewart is arguably the
freshest face in the crowd. Stewart was already a veteran of 18 pictures at
MGM. Yet, none had offered the actor his break out to popular appeal as
anything better than the male ingénue. But Stewart’s heartrending role in Navy Blue and Gold (1935) had
captivated Capra, elevating his belief he had found his ideal ‘everyman’ in
Stewart; an unerring confidence proven one year later when director and star
collaborated on Mr. Smith Goes To
Washington.
Over the years,
speculation has arisen over what caused Lionel Barrymore’s confinement to a
wheelchair. After 1940, the actor never walked again, although he periodically
could stand in place for short intervals of time. Barrymore only hobbles in You Can’t Take It With You, assisted by
a pair of crutches; his infirmity referenced casually in the movie as having
sprained an ankle after losing a wager to slide down the banister at home. What
is known for certain is Barrymore suffered from congenital arthritis already
afflicting him in his youth. By his mid-thirties, this condition had severely
worsened to the point where Barrymore became addicted to morphine and other
pain killers simply to get by. An accident in 1936 fractured Barrymore’s hip.
He would re-injure it again only one year later, never to heal properly. In
retrospect, it is intriguing to reconsider what the rest of Barrymore’s acting
career might have been without this invalidism, although, equally in
retrospect, there remain few actors able to so completely command a room from
their wheelchair.
When You Can’t Take It With You premiered,
the reviews were unanimous, labeling it “a grand picture” with its emphasis “wisely placed on the human rather than on
the farcical (yet) without sacrificing any of the comedy angles.” In the
intervening decades Hollywood, and indeed the world, have gone through seismic
shifts in tastes, talents and technological advancements and, in lieu of at
least some of these changes – and others not discussed herein, the more featherweight
and almost pie-eyed optimism spread thickly throughout You Can’t Take It With You is perhaps a tad more challenging to get
into at the start; the sight of a gawky Ann Miller (later, to be known as ‘tops in taps’ at MGM), deliberately
pirouetting badly about the Vanderhof home, or Misha Auer glowering with his
inimitable brand of lampoon for foreign accents, appearing far more stiltedly
theatrical than it probably did in 1938. What saves the picture and makes it
relevant to today’s audiences is Robert Riskin’s deft screenwriting; his
ability to morph the popular vernacular of the stage – prone to intermittently
long and prosaic pontifications – into palpable, and plot advancing points of
interest. These keep the story afloat and moving forward in a compelling way.
As Riskin’s third act has squarely shifted the focus of the play to increasing
confrontations between Edward Arnold’s caustic titan and Lionel Barrymore’s
impassioned humanist, the darkness that momentarily intrudes on all of their
lives and permeates this otherwise delightfully whacky screwball comedy very
much playing into our tragically contemporary thirst for the demise of
innocence; the penultimate resolution, with its vivaciously ‘happy ending’, restoring a promise made
to us in the movies from long ago: that even the worst of situations can be
worked out to the satisfaction conclusion of all. God bless that notion, sorely
in short supply these days.
You Can’t Take It With You has undergone a
Herculean restoration to resurrect it for this Blu-ray release. In one of those
Hollywood ironies that never ceases to amaze the vintage collector and movie
lover; Columbia’s storage of such immortal screen art over the intervening
decades was anything but stellar. By the early 1980’s virtually all of Frank
Capra’s contributions were in an extremely delicate state of disrepair; some,
like Lost Horizon, only existing in
severely truncated versions, edited down for general re-release. Arguably, You Can’t Take It With You has been one
of the most challenging restorations undertaken by Grover Crisp at Sony
Pictures, the current custodians of the Frank Capra library (among many other
treasures). And Mr. Crisp has once more shown an epic devotion, not only in
maintaining this formidable back catalog, but applying whatever necessary
expenses and digital tools presently available to the studio to resurrect these
careworn elements from near oblivion to a state that – if not perfect –
nevertheless, mark a progressive leap forward from previous efforts to keep this
screen history available for today’s audiences to admire and study.
When Frank Capra
died in 1991, he bequeathed part of his beloved Fallbrook Ranch to Caltech, his
one-time alma mater. Unbeknownst to anyone, the ranch contained a stable with a
padlocked room. As no one had the key – and apparently suffered from a
deplorable lack of curiosity to discover what was inside it – this mysterious
room would remain untouched for nearly another decade. When it was finally
‘broken into’, the discovery of Capra’s own private stockpile of nitrate 35mm
prints, miraculously in good physical condition, provided Caltech with the most
comprehensive collection of the director’s body of work. Alas, the negatives
used to make these prints in 1940 were hardly perfect, due to the common
practice of ‘over printing’. The
preservation of You Can’t Take It With
You would borrow whole portions from these newly unearthed archives,
reinstated into Sony’s existing archived elements to ‘restore’ the audio and
video to optimal condition for this new 4K hi-def release. But be forewarned,
despite these formidable concerted efforts, You Can’t Take It With You is still not going to yield a ‘perfect’
presentation. Time has been very cruel. Even the best of intentions cannot
recreate the opening night splendor audiences thrilled to back in 1938.
That said; the
results achieved on this Blu-ray are nothing short of miraculous. Virtually all
of the built-in dirt, scratches and other age-related mold and water damage
that once plagued this image have been eradicated. The incredible amounts of
density fluctuation and built-in flicker have been tempered to a degree where
either no longer distracts, though both anomalies are still present and
sporadically noticed. This latest restoration has also done much to reduce the
over-contrasted gray scale that, on previous home video incarnations, deprived
viewers of the finer details. The grain structure herein is often very thick.
But again, Sony has done everything in their power to homogenize and stabilize
its consistency. Restoring a classic movie is, in general, a challenging,
labor-intensive, and, time – and money – consuming process. You Can’t Take It With You has made the
Cook’s Tour to virtually all of the premiere facilities leading the charge in
film preservation: from Sony’s own homegrown Colorworks to Cineric in New York,
MTI Film and finally Chace Audio.
The results
achieved are impressive to say the least and should become a cause célèbre for
all studios to reinvest in their aging back catalogs. Sony has proven time and
again to be the only studio consistently applying this fundamental philosophy
to ensure its history does not quietly fade into the annals of time without a
fight and for this reason they are to be sincerely commended and wholeheartedly
supported in their efforts. Buy this disc! Well past its 75th anniversary, You Can’t Take It With You looks every
bit to be pushing eighty. The point herein, is that it looks far better than it
ever has before and, in fact, has been preserved in a manner that makes it
highly watchable, if in no way living up to Blu-ray’s moniker of ‘perfect
picture and theater quality sound’. You Can’t Take It With You has no new
extra features added this time around. We get Frank Capra Jr. reminiscing about
the making of the picture; also, his comprehensive audio commentary, along with
author/historian, Catherine Kellison, plus the original theatrical trailer.
Frankly, it is enough to have the film given back to us after so long and great
an absence, restored and remastered in hi-def and from a 4K source no less.
Bottom line: very highly recommended!
FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)
3.5
VIDEO/AUDIO
4 – for effort (considering the source materials, more
like 3)
EXTRAS
1
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