Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

I don't know if any American film director had a better decade than Frank Capra did in the 1930s. He directed two Oscar-winning Best Pictures (It Happened One Night and You Can't Take It With You), and won three Oscars for Best Directing. He also directed Lost Horizon, Platinum Blonde, and Lady for a Day. But all these years later he is best known for a trilogy (plus an epilogue from the post-war era) that champion small-town virtues and deplore big-city cynicism. These films have come to be known as "Capra Corn." Over the next couple of days I'll take a look at the trilogy, plus some thoughts on the epilogue, It's a Wonderful Life, which shares many of the themes.

I start with Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, from 1936. Gary Cooper stars as Longfellow Deeds, an eccentric from a small town in Vermont. He writes poems for greeting cards, plays the tuba, and likes to chase fire engines. All of this is unnoticed in his home town, but when he inherits 20 million (which went a lot further back then) from a long lost uncle he is whisked to New York by big-city lawyers, and his cornpone ways stand out like a sore thumb.

A slick press agent, Lionel Stander, is hired to keep him away from the press, but a wily female reporter, Jean Arthur (in her first starring role), tricks him by pretending to be a "lady in distress" and woos him, all the while getting the story. She writes front-page articles about him, tags him with the nickname "Cinderella Man," which embarrasses Cooper and enrages Stander. But the lug falls in love with her, and as she gets to know him and sees he's sincere she falls for him, too. After being confronted by a desperately poor man (who says that he's "at the end of his rope," a phrase that would later be used by James Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life) Cooper wants to give all of the money away to poor farmers, but his attorney (Douglas Dumbrille) wants his hands on the fortune and frames Cooper as being insane. The film ends with a prolonged courtroom scene, as Cooper eventually defends himself against the charges.

In the context of when it was made, Mr. Deeds is pure populism, a statement for all that is good and decent about the common man. In a way, it's fairly subversive, but in a cockeyed fashion. Capra was a life-long Republican, and instead of calling for the government to take care of the poor, this film suggests its up to the charitable impulses of the rich--an early treatise on trickle-down economics. Dumbrille says that Cooper giving away the money will interfere with the financial structure of the country, a dubious charge, given that it was already in ruins. The plot could be seen as a reaction to Roosevelt's New Deal, telling us that it wouldn't be necessary if titans of industry were as pure-hearted as Mr. Deeds.

The film is full of telling scenes contrasting Deeds with the sophisticated, and he wins out every time. He longs to meet famous writers, but when he is introduced to a table full of them at a fancy restaurant they mock him, so he punches one in the nose (Deeds has a country boy's penchant for solving problems with violence). He is elected chairman of the board of the opera, but when he finds out they are operating at a loss, he suggests cutting ticket prices, or putting on better shows. When Arthur shows him Grant's tomb, she says that many tourists are disappointed when they see it, but he's all gosh and golly, launching into a speech about how only in America a farm boy like Grant could become general and president. Frankly, the "Capra Corn" tag earns its name with scenes like these.

The courtroom scene (with presiding judge H.B. Warner) drags on a bit too long, and again lays it on a bit too thick, with Cooper answering every charge with cracker-barrel wisdom, making lawyers and psychiatrists look foolish. Two elderly sisters testify that Deeds is "pixillated," a term that goes back to the mid-1800s but became something of a buzz word after the film was released. I'm not sure if the boxer James J. Braddock got the nickname Cinderella Man from this film, but it seems likely.

The great selling point of the film is Cooper, who is magnificent to watch, particularly his facial expressions. After he learns that Arthur has been playing him for a sap his face registers at least three discernible emotions. She was good, too, although she was a last second replacement for Carole Lombard (who made the similarly-themed My Man Godfrey instead). The supporting cast is terrific, and many of them would appear in several Capra pictures.