Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) is a thoughtful commentary on the Great Depression masquerading as a screwball comedy. There are screwballs aplenty, to be sure, but director Frank Capra, as is his wont, manages to show humanity’s noble fight against cynicism in a world full of bad guys lining up to crush us.
Gary Cooper is Mr. Deeds, a flaky, tuba-playing writer of greeting card poems who could be called a misfit except that he fits in very well in the small Vermont community where everybody else is also marching to the beat of their own drum. It is only when he goes to town – New York City, that he stands out as an oddball. Mr. Deeds is idealistic, but suspicious of the motives of people who turn out to actually have ulterior motives—making him strangely canny for someone so naïve on the surface. He is gentle, except for when he belts people in the mouth for pushing his buttons. He is liberally generous to some, and yet expects to get value from his charity from others and admires those who have enough pride to not ask for his help.
Gary Cooper plays the role that fits him like a glove with such ease and believability that his co-star, Jean Arthur, no less capable in her trademark role as the sassy foil, makes it difficult for us to decide who is the more fascinating. It is a case, perhaps, of two actors who employ the same method of effortlessly charming us by apparently just amusing themselves.
Just as he can be a bit vague and preoccupied when spoken to, she also seems distracted by other thoughts, or maybe just has the ability to keep more than one idea in her mind at the same time. When he is approached by the lawyers for the estate of his deceased uncle, he listens with only one ear, busy with his tuba, or dashing off to the window to watch a passing fire truck. When her editor speaks to her, Jean Arthur is playing with a piece of rope or a puzzle toy, seemingly not listening but taking in every word he says. Cooper’s and Miss Arthur’s characters are more alike than even they realize.
Gary Cooper is brought to New York to accept the inheritance left to him, which includes a large mansion and a great fortune. We see he’s a babe in the woods in the big city, but the estate attorney, played by Douglass Dumbrille, steers him to social obligations and financial investments. Mr. Dumbrille’s motives are not fiduciary, however. He attempts to get Cooper to make him power of attorney so that he can control the money and live high off the hog on it, just as he did when the uncle was alive.
Lionel Stander is great in the role of the savvy, snarky man on board to control the press. He is a gravely-voiced tough guy, with more of East Side in him than the gloss of Mr. Dumbrille, and is as disdainful as he is incredulous that Cooper is unfazed by the fortune and actually seems to not particularly want it.
We are treated to a glimpse of Franklin Pangborn as one of the harried tailors trying to measure and outfit Mr. Cooper as he animatedly discusses business with Mr. Dumbrille.
Jean Arthur is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist given the assignment of getting a story on the new millionaire in town, Mr. Cooper, and she pretends to be a poor soul trudging about town looking for a job. When Cooper escapes his bodyguards for a bit of freedom, he encounters her one rainy night on the sidewalk in front of his mansion, fainting from hunger.
He brings her to a cozy restaurant where she is revived with a meal, and after she tells him her story, assuring him she has just gotten a job and starts tomorrow and does not need further help from him, he is charmed, and calls over a violinist playing sad and sweet music.
Her face, coyly partially hidden under the cloche hat, beams. She is enchanted and he very quickly falls in love.
His face, reacting to the pleasure of treating her thus, is a marvel of sweetness and boyish enthusiasm. One of his goals in life is to meet a woman who is a damsel in distress that he may save, and he thinks he has found her.
The romp begins when he recognizes famous literati at the next table and wants to meet them. They are invited to join the party, mainly because the literary men know he is the famous newly rich composer of greeting card schlock and they want to make fun of his work. Jean is wary, she’s not sure if he realizes he is being mocked, but he’s not as naïve as he sounds. He knows very well they are mocking him and he calls them out for their bad manners. It ends with him throwing punches, but one drunken poet, played by Walter Catlett, who gets a charge out of seeing his colleagues thrashed, befriends Cooper and wants to do the town with him. Off they go.
Cooper, introduced to alcohol, spends the evening on a
spree, including such antics as feeding a horse a bag of donuts. He will end up being brought home by two cops
without his clothes. Jean leaves the two
drunken fellows with the staff photographers who are sneaking behind them, and
heads home to write her article on Cooper, dubbing him “Cinderella Man.” (However, we know that he’s not the real Cinderella
Man; that’s boxer James J. Braddock, who was dubbed thus by writer
Damon Runyon the year before Mr. Deeds was released. See the movie Cinderella Man – 2005.)
Her editor, played by George Bancroft is pleased and wants to know how she managed getting through the bodyguards, the PR tough guy Lionel Stander, and a crop of flunkies. She remarks offhandedly, “I was the world’s sweetest ingenue.” She is to be awarded a month’s pay with salary.
Cooper, reading the headlines the next day, is obviously
furious and wants to know whom he can punch (Jean has used a false name with
him), but he consoles himself with another date with his dream girl.
They ride the double-decker buses through the city and he gets to see Grant’s Tomb in a lovely moment of wonder and patriotism. She is moved by his respect for history and great men, and he unknowingly throws a shaft of conscience at her with the remark, “What puzzles me is why people get so much pleasure out of hurting each other.”
On a park bench, they perform a duet of “Swanee River” and “Humoresque” with humming and pretend tuba playing and drumming with sticks on a trash can. It’s pretty good. I would have liked to see them rehearse that one.
Later, we see Jean’s digs, which she shares with pal Ruth Donnelly, who unfortunately does not have a large role, but we see she is an artist while Jean types her column on a big old typewriter on the coffee table in the living room. As she composes another hit piece on Cinderella Man, we see she is feeling guilty and having a change of heart. “I’m crucifying him,” she says, and the theme of the hero being crucified is another favorite Capra trope. We see it as well in Cooper’s role in Meet John Doe (1941), which we discussed here, and by James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), also starring Jean Arthur, which we discussed here.
But he does make good copy.
He abruptly ends a soiree in his mansion for the opera set, scattering
them with disdain and critiquing their pomp.
He writes a poem to Jean that sounds like the opening salvo to a
marriage proposal.
Then the inevitable. Lionel Stander discovers his dream girl and the writer of the articles is the one and the same, and he shows the proof to Gary Cooper, who is stunned, his very stillness and the way the director just lets the film roll is something wonderful. There were not a lot of male actors who could use their faces as effectively as Cooper. He truly had an ability to show the character’s innermost soul with his eyes and a very slight twitch of his expression. We see he is shocked, but also deeply heartbroken as if he might cry. After what seems like a long while, he turns his back to Stander and faces a window, lightly touching a curtain in an absent way.
Stander moves us as well with a quiet, “If I knew you were going to take it so hard, I would have kept my mouth shut. Sorry.”
Cooper, however, is dragged from the depths of despair by a man who breaks into the mansion with a gun. He is a desperate farmer out of work and he accuses Cooper of being just another heartless millionaire. He angrily reminds him of the outrageous antic of feeding donuts to a horse. “You never give a thought to all the people starving,” and that there were people in the world who could not feed their children or themselves. He is played in this wonderful scene by stage and movie veteran John Wray. He did nine movies in this year of 1936, all bit parts and most uncredited. Stander, by the way, did eight this year.
He collapses in tears and apologizes for brandishing a gun,
saying he lost his head. “Standing in
the breadlines. Killed me to take a
handout.” Cooper gets him food and
watches him eat. The wheels begin to
turn and he gets an idea of what to do with the fortune he never wanted anyway.
He will offer 100 acres, a horse, a cow, and a plow to as many
destitute farmers as his money will provide for, some 2,000, and he sets up
headquarters in the grand foyer of his mansion, with staff to help, including the
converted Lionel Stander, and soon his home is filled with applicants.
Douglass Dumbrille is not happy, nor a pretender to the family fortune who shows up with his gold-digger wife late in the game. Lawyer Dumbrille now brings a suit against Cooper, charging him with insanity and needing to be put under his guardianship. H.B. Warner is the head judge, and the public hearing is swamped with deponents, expert witnesses, and a whole lot of “forgotten men.” Jean is there, too, trying to make up to Gary Cooper and to help his case and keep him from being institutionalized.
He wants nothing more to do with her. He will not even defend himself. As part of his charge against Cooper’s philanthropy, Douglass Dumbrille builds his case on the aspect even more egregious than insanity:
philanthropy itself. (Capra, a conservative Republican, had been once poor himself and did not mind pointing out the flaws in oligarchs.) “In these times,
with the country incapacitated by economic ailments and in danger with an
undercurrent of social unrest, the promulgation of such a weird, fantastic, and
impractical plan as contemplated by the defendant is capable of fomenting a
disturbance from which the country may not soon recover. It is our duty to stop it. Our government is
fully aware of its difficulties. It is
capable of pulling itself up out of its economic rut without the assistance of
Mr. Deeds or any other crackpot.” One
wonders if he includes President Roosevelt in that number. One wonders if Capra did.
Two of the witnesses are a pair of sisters, played by Margaret Seddon and Margaret McWade, from Cooper’s Vermont hometown who insist he is nuts, or “pixilated.” Afterward, when Cooper addresses them in his cross-examination, we learn they think everyone is pixilated except themselves.
But at first, he will not defend himself and remains
stubbornly silent. It is only when Jean,
harassed by Mr. Dumbrille into admitting she loves Cooper, that he relents and
gets the gumption to fight for himself.
We have our happy ending when Cooper retains his freedom, his fortune, and is allowed to give it away to help end the Great Depression. He scoops Jean Arthur up into his arms and inexpertly kisses her.
We learn that when money is absent, pluck will go a long way
to aid in survival. It might even have
been true.
*******************************
Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.
My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.
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From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books. From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation.
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