Alex Woloshin Movies

Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's whimsical Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play You Can't Take It With You was transformed into a paean to populism by director Frank Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin. This is the story of the zany Sycamore household, presided over by Grandpa Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore), a former businessman who has turned his back on commerce to enjoy life. At the Sycamores', everyone does just what he or she pleases. Penny Sycamore (Spring Byington), Grandpa's daughter, has become a novelist because someone delivered a typewriter to her home by mistake. Penny's husband makes firecrackers in his basement with the help of Mr. DePinna (Halliwell Hobbes), an iceman who showed up at the Sycamore doorstep one day and never left. Their daughter, Essie (Ann Miller), imagines that she's a prima ballerina, even though her dour teacher, Boris (Mischa Auer), assesses her work with, "Confidentially, it steenks!" Essie's husband, Ed (Dub Taylor), who'd rather play a xylophone than work, spends his free time selling Essie's candy, wrapping each package in paper from a used printing press that dispenses anarchistic slogans. The one normal member of the household is Alice Sycamore (Jean Arthur), in love with wealthy Tony Kirby (James Stewart).

Naturally, when the stuffy, aristocratic Kirbys come to the Sycamores' for dinner, the event is a disaster, capped with the arrest of everyone in the household. Hart and Kaufman's third act found the previously judgmental Kirby softening his attitude toward the freewheeling Sycamore clan, admitting that he's never had so much fun in his life. Screenwriter Riskin altered the focus of the play by throwing out the third act and concentrating upon Tony Kirby's father, Kirby Sr., who as played by Edward Arnold is transformed from a stock stuffed shirt into a ruthless, grasping tycoon, eager to buy up every house on the Sycamores' block to make room for a munitions plant. The film thus became the story of Kirby's regeneration at the hands of the carefree Sycamores. Enough of the play's screwball elements are retained to compensate for Riskin's speechifying and plot distortions (though the softening of one of the play's vital ingredients, Grandpa's refusal to pay his income tax, borders on the sacrilegious). You Can't Take It With You earned several Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director (Capra's third Oscar). ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Anna May Wong, who cornered the 1930s market in Eurasian heroines, stars in Daughter of Shanghai. Wong is on the trail of the criminals who murdered her father. The villains are running an illegal-alien operation, smuggling cheap Chinese and Mexican labor into San Francisco and killing those unlucky souls who prove "inconvenient". Wong takes a job as an exotic dancer in a Central American nitery, hoping to trap the murderers in the act. Though J. Carroll Naish and Buster Crabbe are top-billed, the actual hero of Daughter of Shanghai is Chinese actor Philip Ahn, playing an FBI agent protecting Wong from the bad guys. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

A lesser-known effort from director Josef Von Sternberg, The Case of Lena Smith has been unfairly chastised for all the wrong reasons. It has been branded a financial failure, but in fact its comparatively small box-office take was due to the decision by Paramount Pictures to withdraw several of its late silent releases from distribution and concentrate on talkies. And the casting of Paramount contractee Esther Ralston, who in 1928 was more closely associated with light comedies and romances, has been condemned as a concession to the actress' popularity, when in fact Von Sternberg chose Ralston over Paramount's strenuous objections. The story is set in turn-of-the-century Vienna, where simple peasant girl Lena Smith (Ralston) falls head-over-heels in love with young aristocrat Franz Hofrat (James Hall). The couple are married, despite intense pressure from Hoffrat's blue-blooded family. Ever so slowly and ever so surely, Lena's good nature and unbounded optimism are crushed and shattered by the merciless juggernaut of class consciousness and public opinion, leading unswervingly to a tragic ending. In the original script, Lena Smith was a prostitute, but this was carefully written out to avoid audience animosity against the character (one of the few concessions to popular taste made by Von Sternberg in this instance). Like all of the director's films, The Case of Lena Smith was exquisitely photographed; in fact, there were those who felt that the already gorgeous Esther Ralston never looked better on screen, despite all the suffering endured by her character. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi