Superhero movies are played out. So are leftist Hollywood films such as Rob Reiner’s recent documentary God and Country, which bombed.
Here’s an idea for Hollywood: Remake You Can’t Take It With You, the 1938 classic directed by Frank Capra. It’s a film that defends family, community, and individuality in the face of bureaucracy, war, and heartless monopolies. With artificial intelligence about to absorb America, inflation making people fall behind in bills, social media giants reaching into every life, the government paying for war, and schools creating a leftist monoculture without eccentricity and critical thinking, a new You Can’t Take It With You would be quite relevant — maybe even as much as the film Capra is famous for, It’s a Wonderful Life.
You Can’t Take It With You pits family and community against big money and war. Tony Kirby (James Stewart) works at his family’s bank. His father, Anthony P. Kirby (Edward Arnold), has just gotten a deal to build a government-sanctioned munitions factory. There’s only one problem: a family in a house where the factory is supposed to go refuses to sell.
The patriarch of the house, Martin Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore), and his extended family are oddballs. One spends all her time dancing around the house, two uncles live in the basement and set off fireworks at odd times, and another prints up fliers that make people think he’s a communist. One family habit is to acrobatically fly down the stairs of the big old house on the huge banister. The house is filled with music, joy, explosions, and love.
The conflict happens when Tony falls in love with the bank’s stenographer, Alice (Jean Arthur). What Tony doesn’t know is that Alice is a member of the Vanderhof clan. She lived in the very house that Tony’s father wants to knock down. Thus the rich and powerful clash with the weird, wild, and (literally) explosive.
In the end, the Vanderhofs prevail, even winning over Jimmy Stewart’s stuffy Kirby clan. The film took home Oscar wins for best picture and best director. The play also won a Pulitzer Prize following its 1936 premiere on Broadway.
Though 1938 was a long time ago, You Can’t Take It With You offers a very important lesson for today. Namely, that there is an amazing amount of diversity within the family and that the family is a bulwark against bullying and groupthink by the state.
The first point is especially relevant because it has been so forgotten. G.K. Chesterton once observed that being in a family was like being in the League of Nations. Each child has his or her own habits, hobbies, personality, and dreams. We’ve been brainwashed for so long about “diversity” in every aspect of life that we’ve forgotten how much genuine diversity is in every family.
Stop and think about your parents and siblings. They’re all completely different people. My late brother and I never agreed on politics, but we faced bullies together, and I was always in awe of his award-winning acting ability, which became obvious in high school when he starred in — you guessed it — You Can’t Take It With You.
While made up of people, as a group, the family is bound by blood and love and cannot be broken by bureaucracy or government. The actor and theater critic Ron Fassler emphasized this when he wrote about how You Can’t Take It With You remains popular today and is always being performed somewhere. “One reason for its extraordinary popularity in those days is that it was a much-need salve for the wounds after World War II,” Fassler wrote. “And why not? The play portrays an eccentric family that lives life the way they want to live it. Not selfishly — not at all — but on their own terms. They are kind and considerate. They don’t want to be pushed around and told what to do, that’s all. None more so than Grandpa who never once paid any income tax.”
During the Great Depression, World War II, the 1960s, and now 2024, the message of being part of a loving, if offbeat, family that protects its members against the abuses of the state is a powerful one. A remake of You Can’t Take It With You could offer a modern family considered weird by today’s standards. All the children are straight. They distrust social media and read novels and listen to jazz. One is a libertarian skateboarder. Another is into punk rock. The daughter is a space nerd who worships Elon Musk. The parents still hate paying taxes. The government wants to knock down their house to build a transgender outreach center. You can keep the parts about fireworks and the kids flying down the banister.
A conservative film that also celebrates the family and the straight libertarian oddball’s defiance of the state? Hollywood would never dare.
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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
