The New Pictures

You Can't Take It With You (Columbia). When the play from which this picture was derived opened in Manhattan in December 1936, critics complained that Playwrights George Kaufman and Moss Hart had failed to equip it with plot, that their eccentric characters were freaks rather than human beings. Translation from the stage to cinema sometimes has extraordinary results. In this case, the result is spectacular proof that the comic exterior of You Can't Take It With You concealed not merely plot but superb dramatic conflict, and that its characters, far from being freaks, were really human beings drawn on the heroic scale. Brilliantly explored by Writer Robert Riskin, Director Frank Capra and the season's most astutely chosen cast, these unforeseen potentialities make the Pulitzer Prize-winning play of 1937 into what is easily the No. 1 cinema comedy of 1938.

Most titanic rebel in the group of legendary rebels which You Can't Take It With You assembles in the living room of a shabby urban household is Grandpa Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore), retired for 35 years because he decided one morning 'that working was no fun. His daughter, Penny Sycamore (Spring Byington). writes plays because someone once delivered a typewriter to the house by mistake; his son-in-law (Samuel Hinds) manufactures fireworks in the basement; his granddaughter, Essie (Ann Miller), studies ballet with a ferociously impecunious Russian (Mischa Auer); and the assorted camp followers of the Vanderhpf-Sycamore menage pass their time playing the xylophone, experimenting with false faces and training pet birds. Thus when Alice Sycamore (Jean Arthur), the only member of the family normal enough to work for a living, falls in love with her boss (James Stewart), scion of the fabulously rich and conventional Anthony P. Kirbys, it occasions not only a meeting between the two clans but a Homeric clash of creeds.

In the play, the climax of the clash, like all the rest of the action, occurred in the Vanderhof living room, where the Kirbys, arriving the night before they had been invited for dinner, were just in time to be carted off to jail when the fireworks in the basement exploded prematurely. Unimpeded by the restrictions of the stage, the camera follows the party to jail, then into court, then into the newspapers, then into a board meeting at the Kirby bank in a series of scenes which lifts the feud between the Kirbys and the Vanderhofs to the plane of that between the Montagues and Capulets. By the time Grandpa Vanderhof and Banker Kirby (Edward Arnold) eventually symbolize their inevitable meeting of minds by sitting down together to play Polly-Woily-Doodle on harmonicas. their duet affords some of the emotional impact of a Beethoven symphony.

Wholly successful moving pictures are the consequence of a collaboration too complex for analysis. Nonetheless, if the Motion Picture Academy fails to award Director Capra its prize for his first picture since Lost Horizon, most critics will be justified in surmising that its only excuse will be that he has already won it twice before. Known for his knack of inventing "business," Director Capra was faced with the supreme test in a play that was already as full of business as a beehive. How thoroughly he passed it can best be judged by the fact that his shrewd cinema editing helps more than anything else to achieve the paradox of making Vanderhofs and Sycamores on the screen seem more like flesh and blood than they did on the legitimate stage. Examples: Grandpa's friends taking up a collection to pay his fine in court; Alice Sycamore, asked to hurry downstairs, arriving to meet her prospective parents-in-law via the bannister rail; Penny Sycamore using a kitten as a paper weight.

Boys Town (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). In 1917 a young Omaha priest named Father Edward J. Flanagan borrowed $90 to start a unique U. S. institution: Boys Town, Neb., a home for waifs, run according to its founder's belief that there is no such thing as a bad boy. Lately grown acutely conscious of the problems of youth, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer naturally found in Boys Town cinematerial well up to the standard of that supplied by the Russell-Cotes naval training institution in England. The result, in this picture, is a companion piece to Lord Jeff, with Mickey Rooney replacing Freddie Bartholomew as the urchin who eventually conquers a criminal background to become a credit to his school.

Written by John Meehan and Dore Schary, supplied with data from Father Flanagan, who acted as technical advisor, directed by Norman Taurog (Skippy, Tom Sawyer), Boys Town presents its subject with commendable simplicity. As Father Flanagan, Spencer Tracy supplies a grave paternalism well calculated to contrast with Master Rooney's fantastic swagger.

Most impressive scenes in the picture are those, some made on location at Boys Town, showing the working of student government, dormitory shenanigans, methods of handling recalcitrant newcomers.

Equipped, inevitably, with a story in which the hero is torn between loyalty to Boys Town and to his old life, represented by a bank-robbing older brother, the picture focuses principally on Father Flanagan. In real life, Father Flanagan has never been ashamed to publicize his enterprise getting celebrities like Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey and the late Will Rogers to visit Boys Town, sending the school band out to tour the country. Final sequence in the picture, with characteristic fidelity to fact, leaves Father Flanagan planning to enlarge Boys Town's population to 500 and hoping to get the necessary funds by prayer--to which cinemaddicts may surmise, this picture may well turn out to be the answer.

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