You Can't Take It With you: anthem to the cinema

You Can’t Take It With You is an ode to the cinema.

At the age of eighty, there is nothing that makes it more naive or outdated. In the residence of Grandpa Vanderhof people live together and do exactly what they want and only what they want: children, grandchildren, sons-in-law or simply people who went there and did not leave.

This anarchic family-community, perhaps a harbinger of what, thirty years later, would become the hippies contrasts sharply with the other family plot, the grumpy banker JP Kirby who, investing in the design of an ammunition plant (the movie is prior to World War II), needs to buy a whole neighborhood, but his investment is frustrated precisely by a resident who insists on not selling his property: Vanderhof that regards ​​more the family values ​​than any value in money.

But another quarrel makes the fate of families intersect: the romance between J. P.’s son and vice president of the company, Tony, and his secretary Alice, by chance Grandpa's granddaughter who does not want to sell the house.

The scene of the rich family's visit to the Sycamores house is worthy of the so-called screwball comedies of the 1930s, though the film lacks a vocation for laughter, drifting to incredibly modern themes like greed for more and more money, impoverishment of the population (would the 2008-09 Recession be a remake of the Great Depression?), and even the fear of the "red peril," the Communist threat that has been attending America's electoral agendas.

The ending of the movie is a good example of what was called in the Capra-corn era, movies that extol the best that was (and still is) in human nature: sensitivity, gentleness, humility, and good humor.

If we understand that mankind is governed by greed, selfishness and lack of love, it is easy to understand how the solutions of You Can’t Take It With You lead us to moments of pure enlightenment and dream. As Vanderhof persuades the accountant Poppins to leave the bank and move to his house to make masks and toys, he, still wary, says: "the die is cast".

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