Frank Capra is, if not the epitome, then the essence of New Deal era Hollywood filmmaking. A Columbia Pictures contractee his movies are suffused with the ideals of a post-Depression culture and it is to his body of work, but especially his films of the 1930s, that his legend is rooted. Subdued by the harsh material realities of the times his cinematic canvas is equally buoyed with the ad hoc mixture of optimism, ingenuity and intelligence that seems the hallmark of his heroes and heroines.

Where the first two terms of Roosevelt's presidency saw one of the nation's most active federal governments, so too did theater screens see Capra's vision of the American experience put to life with the aid of comic emphasis and tragic implication. In this exchange between the politics of involvement and the aesthetics of celebrating ordinary people, the director's stamp was parlayed through melodramatic appeals and light comedy. Each of his extant films is therefore filled with reminders of passing bad times and upcoming good ones to end up as part of the sentimental carapace surrounding the Hollywood myth itself.

Informed by a nostalgic sense of simpler times made complex in the modern era the traditional values of Capra's films are drawn from frontier myths and agrarian folklore. Men are honest, trustworthy and heart spoken, even when working under duress or experiencing the worst from their fellow man. Women are demure, excitable and pleasant in order to act as true north for the film's typically amoral universe. Minority groups are present though pushed to the border of plot developments while the predominant virtues of his stories affirm the paramount need for truth, the importance of family and the sense of being on God's right hand.

Adapted by Robert Riskin from a play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, You Can't Take It With You is a movie perched somewhat uncomfortably between the worst of the Depression's height and the terror of a coming World War still some few years distant. As such it's an imprint of its idyllic moment, 1938, while also being another in a long line of Capra movies dealing with the specifically American personality and its various flaws and foibles. Moreover, it's a picture that easily demonstrates the director's preoccupation with truth, virtue and the struggle for happiness.

Opening on Wall Street with a financial titan as he tries closing a deal intended to corner the market for American munitions production, Anthony Kirby (Edward Arnold) is the determined banker with little time for anything save his next transaction. Into his hierarchical world is placed the amused indifference of his son, Tony (James Stewart), a vice president in the family business, along with a complication concerning his latest near triumph. Namely, it seems that the private landowner is holding up the deal by refusing to sell his home that's intended to provide space for a new munitions factory.

With typical indifference to the struggles of little people standing in his way as faceless names from his view in charge of the forces of capital, Kirby dispatches his minions to bend the landowner to his will and therein is the ironic twist of the picture. Little does he know that Tony is in love with an employee of his, young woman named Alice Sycamore (Jean Arthur), the granddaughter of the thorny landowner affectionately known as Grandpa Sycamore (Lionel Barrymore).

Moving then in two different but increasingly related directions, the movie concerns two forms of reconciliation. On the one hand Tony and Alice seek family approval for pending nuptials. Meanwhile Kirby himself continues to try bulldozing Grandpa to reap another personally unsatisfying triumph that will surely add to his riches while further corrupting his sense of goodness in the world. Naturally Tony and Alice are perfectly matched for one another yet his parents remain indifferent to her bohemian bride as an affront to their social standing. Conversely, Grandpa and his unusual household filled with family and friends pursuing what makes them individually happy view Tony's parents as the opposite of what's most important in the world.

Though the Sycamores are weird with their tolerance of individual identity and the struggle for personal satisfaction, they are also the more clearly nurturing and loving household with members that include a playwright, fireworks manufacturer, marimba player, stamp assessor and two fairly integrated black servants.

As Grandpa continues to resist the sale of his home, Kirby's lieutenants expand their efforts to intimidate him. Simultaneously Tony takes Alice's invitation to host their families for dinner but shows up with his parents one night too early to throw both groups into disarray. Plodding to an unpleasant conclusion the evening is ended with a police bust indirectly instigated by Kirby that finds everyone arrested for disturbing the peace.

While awaiting arraignment Grandpa explains to Kirby how the pursuit of happiness is more important than making money and predicts that the banker will end up a failed man. He naturally scoffs at the idea although the prospect weighs heavily in his mind through the ensuing press attacks that result in Alice dishing out just desserts to her would-be in-laws before storming off for parts unknown without her doe eyed lover.

Attempting to make everyone happy Grandpa finally agrees to sell his house because he wants the Sycamores to join Alice on her journey away from heartbreak. Poised then to bring off his deal that will be the biggest feather in his bonnet, ever, Kirby has a turn in conscience. It follows Tony's news about how he's leaving Wall Street to pursue his dreams and find Alice to make himself happy because he really loves her and knows banking isn't the life for him.

Befitting its happy ending, Kirby sells Grandpa's house back to him and gives his ascent to Tony and Alice's union. As they pray together for health, happiness and the good Lord's influence Grandpa welcomes the Kirby clan to a Sycamore family dinner as everyone grins at one another about an optimistic future.

Of course the moral lesson about pursuing personal satisfaction over material gains is everywhere evident in the picture. Based as it is in the title phrase, "you can't take it with you," Grandpa emphasizes this point about what's most important and then focusing on that thing no matter how silly it might seem in light of the greater society.

Just to one side of this imperative are a number of throwaway points about ideology, social and class distinctions and the virtues of everyday people. None of them is ever put at the center of the plot but You Can't Take It With You does flirt with the notion of patriotism, self-confidence, hard work and loyalty as the true basis of change and personal success. In this way it idealizes American capitalism with its system of economic exchange as a primarily social structure allowing people to bind themselves to one another as the preferred method for overcoming mutual troubles, just then easily remembered as the Great Depression.

Using historical memory in this way to emphasize generosity and kindness as the ends of a more noble and community-oriented pursuit, Capra's movie is motivated by nearly propagandistic goals. It encourages mutuality but roots it in individual expression after watering down the frequently insurmountable obstacles of individual fantasy.

Not striking too hard at the point, You Can't Take It With You presents a group of likable misfits who would be gutter-bound and destitute were it not for Grandpa Sycamore and his sanctuary-like house. Instead of complicating these vibrant fantasies about personal expression with material considerations, Capra's movie dismisses the need for earning money and conforming to society as merely another of many coats to disavow on the way to perfectly expressed individuality.

It's a tough distinction, this idea of forming supportive communities and remaining idiosyncratic and unique. Almost like a hair style worn when its moment is done the sentiments of You Can't Take It With You seem somehow out of touch with the historical shift into war just then beginning to sweep America and the rest of the world. However, it is a testament to the potency of representing personally satisfied, happy and faithful people working through the problems of love and big business over a family meal.

Though I see the importance of the film's message and of its constituent parts, including an early star turn by Jimmy Stewart, it's actually quite slow and not very affecting. It's also oddly out of touch with itself since its characters are nonconforming except for their conformity and unique save for their sameness. All lessons about what's most valuable distill to notions of family and togetherness even while the film's presented families and opportunities for togetherness, most notably when the Kirbys and Sycamores are locked up by the police, only result in further frustration and dissatisfaction before eventual release and redemption.

Unusual for its place in annual celebrations, the 1938 Academy Awards race has a relatively high number of truly important works nominated for Outstanding Production. You Can't Take It With You won the top award but it was in competition with nine other titles as per the Academy's existing rules. Though history has largely minimized the lasting weight of such titles as Test Pilot, Four Daughters, Pygmalion, The Citadel and Alexander's Ragtime Band, the same can't be said about the other four nominees.

Among them perhaps the most famous is The Adventures of Robin Hood, Errol Flynn's swashbuckling follow-up to Captain Blood. But there was Bette Davis in Jezebel, Spencer Tracy in Boys Town and that most memorable of all period dramas, Grand Illusion. Plus it bears mention that Bringing Up Baby wasn't even nominated even if movie audiences since 1938 have remembered it as the highpoint of screwball comedy if not as an early high point in the careers of Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant.

Such a strong cohort of Oscar nominees highlights negative judgments of You Can't Take It With You, but with two reasons for reticence and mild disaffection. The first is a tip of the metaphorical hat to Frank Capra whose work has informed the black and white timbered memories of at least two generations who remember the Depression as the unlikeliest of introductions to the second half of the 20th Century. To them a work like the picture of the year winner can't be simply discounted for its simplistic moral message and sentiment because it no longer works for a modern audience impatient with character actors trying to entertain within a narrow story about reconciliation and redemption. Then there's a second, and perhaps more demanding, point about timeliness as concerns the merits of particular films.

Context sensitivity aside, it's hard for me to consider You Can't Take It With You as the best movie of 1938. Not with the simultaneous nomination of Grand Illusion, The Adventures of Robin Hood and especially in light of the overlooked Bringing Up Baby. Even with these exceptions, though, I do understand how Capra's movie further defined the aesthetic we now regard as being Capraesque. I simply choose to minimize these virtues in a lesser work from his oeuvre even while recognizing how it impacted its original audience to lay the fantasy for a better world that never came true, exactly.