Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

Movie Review: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

Year of Release: 1936
Country of Origin: USA
Director: Frank Capra
Cast: Gary Cooper, Jean Arthur

Plot outline: Longfellow Deeds, a simple-hearted tuba player, inherits a fortune and has to contend with opportunist city slickers (IMDb).

The directing-writing combination which functioned so successfully in It Happened One Night has spiced this light-hearted story with wit, novelty, and ingenuity. Longfellow Deeds is the hero of the occasion and he becomes one of our favorite characters under the attentive handling of Gary Cooper. Mr. Deeds is the poet laureate of Mandrake Falls, Vermont. He writes greeting-day verses, and plays the tuba in the town band. Then an uncle dies, leaving his $20,000,000 estate to him, and he - slightly dazed but unimpressed by his sudden riches - is tossed willy-nilly into scheming New York. Crooked lawyers beset him, the board of the opera elects him chairman, a girl reporter gains his confidence and then headlines him as the "Cinderella Man". Crushed, derided, deceived, and disillusioned, the lean Mr. Deeds prepares to share the wealth by establishing a collective farm colony and then, cruelest jest of all, he is hauled before a lunacy commission and only by the narrowest of margins and the love of Jean Arthur, the repentant sob sister, escapes being adjudged a manic depressive. If this is the story in outline, it does not attempt to capture the gay, harebrained, but entirely ingratiating quality of the picture. To appreciate that, you will have to watch Mr. Cooper struggling with the tuba, Mr. Stander fighting off apoplexy, Raymond Walburn (that most perfect gentleman's gentleman) raising his voice against an echo, and, ultimately, the scene of the lunacy commission's hearing which is as perfect a spoof of alienists and expert testimony as the screen has presented. It is on this rousingly comic note that the movie ends, and the memory of it should be enough to erase the vague impression we got that the movie had bogged down for a time in mid-career. (NYT)

My judgement: ***1/2 out of 4 stars