Two Capra Oscar winners

It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934) 

It Happened One Night reminds me of Some Like It Hot, another putative comedy that isn't all that funny. As the AWOL socialite and the street-smart reporter chasing her, Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable are sexy, natural, and even deserving of their Oscars. But the only time they generate spasmodic laughter is when they're not playing themselves, i.e., the scene when they're posing as bickering husband and wife to hoodwink detectives. The hilarious moments belong to tertiary characters such as the oily Oscar Shapeley (Roscoe Karns) trying to pick up Colbert on a bus and, especially, Danker (Alan Hale) who turns everything Colbert and Gable say into a song. The chief value of It Happened One Night, then, is how it puts a later Colbert comedy into relief. One of the many reasons why The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942) is the greatest classical Hollywood comedy is that Sturges ceded much of his story to secondary characters, draining the exigency from the central heterosexual romance and fashioning a more inclusive universe. 

You Can't Take It with You (Frank Capra, 1938)

Anyone upset with Beyoncé for telling the masses to quit their jobs on "Break My Soul" will loathe this film. As per Richard Dyer's famous dictum, You Can't Take It with You tells us what utopia feels like but not how to organize it. Poppins (the perfectly named Donald Meek) is our surrogate. Early in the film, he leaves his position as an accountant for the nasty banker Anthony P. Kirby (Edward Arnold) to join the eccentrics at Grandpa Martin Vanderhof's (Lionel Barrymore) home, an artist and inventor utopia threatened by Kirby's desire to tear it down and expand his empire. We want to be like Poppins and join this collective. But how will we sustain ourselves? How do they sustain themselves? Does Spring Byington's typing bring any money in? Ann Miller's dancing? What about all those inventions blowing up in the basement? Is this the Empire Records of 1938? 

It Happened One Night: B+

You Can't Take It with You: B+