Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936)

Mr Deeds Goes to Town is a first class comedy directed by Frank Capra and starring Gary Cooper.

I love how these old movies went through the credit sequence. First screen: A Frank Capra Production; GARY COOPER in; Mr. Deeds Goes to Town; with Jean Arthur; Directed by Frank Capra. As simple as that, ninety percent of the relevant information is dispensed with in one frame. By the way, this movie is so old "Miss Columbia" is a caricature and has a torch spitting flames like a Fourth of July sparkler.

Mr Deeds tells the tale of a rural Vermont man Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper) whose rich uncle dies and leaves him $20 million - an unfathomable sum in the midst of the Great Depression.

He must go down to New York City to collect and there the simple man runs into every sort of phony you can imagine. Deeds is so unsophisticated that he talks to anybody and shares his inner thoughts offhandedly.

Jean Arthur plays Babe Bennett, a newspaper reporter who masquerades as a lady in distress to get close to Deeds. She begins writing front page exposes on Deeds, using him as the butt of all the classic country bumpkin jokes, making him a laughing stock of the whole town.

Deeds also is intelligent and sees through all the scam artists, except for Jean Arthur whom he thinks is totally honest. When he finds out she has been scamming him too he is heartbroken and resolves to give his money to the farmers who have been evicted from their farms by the Depression. The crooked lawyer (Douglas Dumbrille), who has been embezzling the fortune all along, to avoid exposure must make a case that Deeds is insane so the money can be transferred to a more cooperative relative who was cut out of the will. The court case is one that is renowned as one of the best ever filmed. You'll have to watch it yourself to see how it comes out.

Gary Cooper (Sergeant York) is at his charmingest as Longfellow Deeds. He is so unassuming he plays tuba with the marching band that is playing for his send-off. Jean Arthur (Shane) with her cute little Robin Hood hat, is a great looking femme and certainly looks good paired up with Coop. The supporting cast includes froggy-voiced Lionel Stander as Cobb, the city slicker who runs interference for Deeds with the press but can't keep him from unknowingly feeding new information to Arthur for her scandal sheet. Of course, Douglas Dumbrille does a great job as the oily lawyer who has been tapping the cookie jar. The rest of the supporting cast are familiar faces who do their jobs well.

The script has many great and quotable lines and does a good job of comedy, but a minor con I would point out is it teaches a flawed message that the person who has something has to answer to the person who has not. Politicians use this principle all the time to divide and conquer. This is a typical wrinkle of Capra's writing style to play weak vs strong, poor vs rich, etc., and is good for providing dramatic tension but a bad lesson for the upstanding individual to take to heart. There is no free lunch and nobody owes anybody anything just because they are using up oxygen. Other than this manipulative sequence, put across well by John Wray and Gary Cooper, the movie is charming and well done, and I would not take away any stars for it but just wanted to point out the collectivist mindset moviemakers sometimes try to foster.

The Columbia DVD is presented in 1.33:1 Black and White and runs 115 minutes. There is a commentary by Frank Capra, Jr. and a retrospective featurette, also by Frank Capra, Jr., son of the director.

Also by Frank Capra, the supremely funny It Happened One Night.


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV