YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU 1938

You Can't Take It With You            1938

Is it possible that one of the two Frank Capra movies to win the Best Picture award is actually the weakest?

Well, the other winner was It Happened One Night (1934). The non-winners were Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Lost Horizon (1937), You Can't Take It With You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Meet John Doe (1941), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) and It's a Wonderful Life (1946).

All are classics. Put those up for an Internet vote, and It’s a Wonderful Life might win. The corny but magical It Happened One Night and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington are my second-place finishers, and You Can’t Take It With You comes in dead last.

Jimmy Stewart, one of my favorite actors, overplays his character by a factor of X, especially in the beginning, lying across his stenographer (Jean Arthur’s) desk and whispering sweet nothings in her ear. He’s supposed to be adorable, but honestly, if any man did this, would he be respected?

To be fair, You Can’t Take It With You is a screwball comedy, and in the 1930s, actors did overplay their roles in a way that wouldn’t be seen today. Still, viewed through the prism of 2011, You Can’t Take It With You seems simplistic and silly.

Tony Kirby is the vice-president of the company owned by his father, Anthony P. Kirby. Senior’s motto seems to be, “He who dies with the most toys wins.” His marbles are real estate and money.

By Capraesque coincidence, stenographer Alice Sycamore is in love with her boss, Tony, and Anthony P. Kirby is the land-grabber who needs to buy one last house in a 12-block area so that Kirby Arms can build a munitions plant and become biggest arms dealer in the world.

Standing between Kirby and his monopoly: Alice's grandfather, who is also the most respected, beloved man in town, Martin Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore). And Grandpa is the leader of an eccentric clan that invites strangers to live in an anarchical house where no one cares for money. So Kirby’s offer of $25,000 for the house is ignored, and so is $50,000 and $100,000. After the Kirbys, the town’s biggest snobs, are invited to dinner on the wrong night, they learn that Alice’s grandfather is the holdout, that he’s zany, and that everyone else in the house is a madcap.

That sets up the romantic friction between Alice and Tony, and the reason why she walks out on their engagement. And it’s the only reason why Grandpa would ever sell his beloved Victorian house: to make his granddaughter happy.

This is a war between the classes, except the don’t-worry-be-happy family doesn’t care to fight.

Trivia

Before filming started, Lionel Barrymore was crippled by arthritis and a hip injury. That’s why a sprained ankle was written into the film; Barrymore acted the film on crutches. He also received hourly injections for pain.

Passed over

1938 was a classic year in film: The Adventures of Robin Hood starring Errol Flynn; Bring Up Baby with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn; Angels with Dirty Faces with James Cagney and Pat O’Brien, Pygmalion, Boys Town and Jezebel.

Best Actors

Spencer Tracy won for Boys Town and Bette Davis for Jezebel. Supporting actors were Walter Brennan in Kentucky and Fay Bainter in Jezebel.

Capra was the hottest move maker in Hollywood, taking home his third Best Director award in five years.

Alexander's Ragtime Band was nominated and won for Best Score. It was a backstage musical about two songwriters, Don Ameche and Tyrone Power, who battled for the affections of Alice Faye.

Jezebel was Civil War drama about a selfish, stubborn Southern belle. Sound familiar? Yes, Hollywood has a tendency to make the same film twice (Wyatt Earp and Tombstone) or three times (Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now). Gone with the Wind won Best Picture the very next year.

THE LIFE OF EMILE ZOLA 1937

The Life of Emile Zola 1937

Who the heck was Emile Zola? That’s why biographies are useful.

From the 10^th film to win an Oscar for Best Production, we learn that Émile Zola (eMIL Zola) was a great 19^th century French writer, thinker and activist.

Today, he’s famous for nothing we would remember, but back in the 1800s, he wrote “J’Accuse.” Like Bob Woodward reproaching Richard Nixon for being a corrupt president, Zola exposed the French army for falsely convicting the Jewish Capt. Alfred Dreyfus for passing military secrets to the Germans. The army then covered up its mistake by exonerating the real traitors.

Zola had risked his career and his life; he was convicted and fled to England. After he proved to be right, the French government fell.

Zola was just a shipping clerk who got a job in a newspaper advertising department. He also wrote book and art reviews, and finally became a political journalist. He first crossed literary swords with Napoleon III, president of the French Second Republic, who engineered a coup d'état that made him emperor.

Twenty of his novels commented on French life: violence, alcohol, prostitution and the Industrial Revolution. "I want to portray, at the outset of a century of liberty and truth, a family that cannot restrain itself in its rush to possess all the good things that progress is making available and is derailed by its own momentum, the fatal convulsions that accompany the birth of a new world."

Sounds like 2011 America, doesn’t it?

The most successful was the ninth (1880) novel, “Nana,” a streetwalker who destroyed every man who pursued her.

The Life of Emile Zola is a forgotten film about a forgotten man, played by Paul Muni, the forgotten Tom Cruise of his time. It may be the least known of all the Academy Award winning Best Pictures.

Shoulda Woulda Coulda

Zola’s competition included Captains Courageous, The Good Earth, Lost Horizon, Stage Door and the original Janet Gaynor version of A Star is Born.

1937 was one of those stellar years in films. It also included Topper, Greta Garbo in Camille, Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas.

Trivia

The Good Earth was the last film supervised by legendary producer MGM Irving J. Thalberg. The first of Oscar’s lifetime achievement awards went to Darryl Zanuck.

The Awful Truth was nominated for Best Production, Irene Dunne for Best Actress, Ralph Bellamy for Best Supporting Actor, and Leo McCarey for Best Director and Screenplay, but the male lead, Cary Grant, was ignored. He wouldn’t be nominated until Penny Serenade (1941).

Best Song went to "Sweet Leilani" from the musical Waikiki Wedding. Snubbed: "They Can't Take That Away From Me," sung by Fred Astaire and written by George and Ira Gershwin in Shall We Dance.

A Walt Disney masterpiece, Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs, was nominated only for Best Score, and it lost. Animated films, Cary Grant, science fiction and Stephen Spielberg didn’t win easy respect.

Both Ginger Rogers and Katharine Hepburn were overlooked for their performances in Stage Door.

Camille, directed by George Cukor, one of the all-time greatest romantic tearjerkers, received only one nomination for Best Actress, which Garbo lost.

THE GREAT ZIEGFELD 1936

The Great Ziegfeld 1936

Like all mediums, movies can be educational. Biopics, of course, don’t try to be as factual as documentaries, but they do impart lots of information and a sense of what the subject’s life was like.

From The Great Ziegfeld, we learn there was a Florenz Ziegfeld, he did change Broadway with the Ziegfeld Follies, and he discovered great talent like Fannie Brice (Streisand played her in Funny Girl), W.C. Fields and Jazz Singer Eddie Cantor.

And then, of course, there was Irving Berlin, whose work was featured in the Follies. Maybe that was why the Great Ziegfeld was the first biopic and the second musical to win an Academy Award.

Another reason, of course, was the brilliant cast: the great William Powell in the title role, Luise Rainer (who received the Best Actress Oscar for Ziegfeld’s first wife, stage actress Anna Held, and Myrna Loy as movie actress Billie Burke (Burke’s most famous role: Good Witch Glinda in The Wizard of Oz).

Zieggy was the guy who popularized revues: a strongman, dancers, singers and novelty acts like Will Rogers, a comedian who also twirled a lasso like no one else. However, Zieggy also staged 101 musicals; the most famous were Show Boat and The Three Musketeers.

William Powell failed to win an Oscar for his portrayal of Ziegfeld, but he won the same year for My Man Godfrey. The other nominees: Gary Cooper, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town; Walter Huston and Spencer Tracy.

Paul Muni was the winner for The Story of Louis Pasteur. (The next year, Muni would play Emile Zola, which would win the next Best Picture. Muni would be nominated again, but would not win.)

Of the nine Best Picture winners, Ziegfeld and Broadway Melody seemed the weakest. That’s an unproveable opinion, because the Great Ziegfeld did win three Oscars: Best Picture, Best Actress Luise Rainer, and Best Dance Direction for A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.

Zieggy was nominated for four more statuettes: Best Art Direction, Film Editing, and Original Screenplay. Robert Z. Leonard lost Best Director to Frank Capra for Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.

The two classic near misses were George Cukor’s Romeo & Juliet, starring Norma Shearer,  Leslie Howard and John Barrymore, and Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Capra won for best director, though.

The film cost $2 million to make, so Universal sold it to MGM for $300,000. Ultimately it earned $40 million.