Directed by Frank Capra • 1938 • United States
Starring Jean Arthur, Lionel Barrymore, James Stewart

Frank Capra’s irresistible adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize–winning stage hit by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart is perhaps the most bighearted and optimistic comedy from a filmmaker who specialized in bighearted optimism. James Stewart and Jean Arthur are the young lovers—he the rich-kid scion of a money-hungry industrialist, she a humble stenographer—whose vastly different backgrounds lead to complications when she takes him home to meet her family of lovably eccentric kooks, presided over by Lionel Barrymore’s free-spirited patriarch. An Oscar winner for best picture and director, YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU is timeless entertainment and an unabashedly sweet and sentimental expression of Capra’s all-American idealism.