La critique de Witney Seibold (part1)

You Can’t Take It With You is largely a Romeo &Juliet story, about young lovers from differing castes who want to marry. The immortal Jimmy Stewart (who would work regularly with not only Capra, but rising star Alfred Hitchcock) plays a calm, soft-spoken rich boy named Tony Kirby, the uncharacteristically laid-back son of the wound-up, wealthy banker Anthony P. Kirby (Edward Arnold from The Devil and Daniel Webster). Kirby, Sr. has plans to buy out a local neighborhood and replace it with a brand new, ultra-spiffy neighborhood. All he has to do it buy up one final property. If that story sounds familiar, it should; it’s been used in hundreds of movies since. It was even a plot point in the recent Brick Mansions.

And who should own that property but Martin Vanderhoff (Lionel Barrymore from Grand Hotel)? Martin is eternally bemused by the world. He walks around on crutches because he was dared to slide down a bannister. His personal interests skew toward hugs and harmonicas. His home is a bustling hodgepodge of inventors, musicians, dancers, and artists. His relatives make toys and firecrackers for a living. Early in the film, Martin adopts one of Kirby’s accountants (Donald Meek) to join their little ragtag family of inventors because the accountant has invented one of the damn cutest toys I’ve ever seen: it’s a mechanical bunny that pops up out of an Easter egg. It also just so happens that Martin’s feisty daughter Alice (Jean Arthur) is engaged to Tony Kirby, their romance having been carried out largely in secret before the film begins.