Mr. Deeds Goes To Town

There is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

Call me a sap, but there’s something about starry-eyed idealism mixed with screwball comedy that makes me a sucker for so many movies directed by the great Frank Capra: It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, You Can’t Take it With You, It Happened One Night, Arsenic and Old Lace and even Meet John Doe. With this kind of background love of a director’s work, I eagerly anticipating watching Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, another Frank Capra film.

The plot is ripe for Caprian dramatics. Made in the middle of the Great Depression, the movie weaves its fantasy around the issues of the times: Mr. Deeds, an unassuming small town man played by Gary Cooper, inherits an absurdly large fortune, and goes to New York to figure out what to do with his money. He falls for an undercover female reporter who writes stories making fun of him until she (of course) falls for him, too. He then meets a desperate and poor farmer, and Mr. Deeds decides he wants to spend his money to fund farms for thousands of poor and homeless families. This abrupt and altruistic decision causes the moneygrubbers surrounding Mr. Deeds to claim that he is insane and his fortune should be taken away from him, and the movie culminates in a sanity hearing where all characters can make their rousing speeches to the judge and the movie audience.

Such trite plots usually provide Capra an excellent platform on which to direct feel-good movies that amount to character studies of the American Everyman. Like Mr. Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Mr. Deeds is supposed to represent the noble average American, and represents the resilience of such Men through the Great Depression. The movie even won Capra Best Director in the 1936 Academy Awards, which I think can only be a testament to the era's sentimentality to such a message, because, frankly, the movie itself wasn't that good.

I really wanted to like Mr. Deeds and his movie, but the movie just didn’t age well. Mr. Deeds comes off more as a spoiled brute who punches people and silently sulks, rather than an unspoiled individualist who stands up and speaks out against corruption. What’s more, he also rotates between naïve country bumpkin and hardnosed businessman just about every five minutes. While Gary Cooper can carry both Mr. Deeds personas with aplomb, the rapid switches are almost too much to take, creating an almost dizzying affect for a modern audience. Mr. Deeds goes from sympathetic listener one moment to domineering authoritarian kicking the speaker out the door the next moment. We go from a goofy-looking Gary Cooper easily duped by Jean Arthur’s female reporter to scowling Cooper sucker punching a bunch of elite poets. What’s going on here? This is the ideal American? I certainly hope not.

In sum, this movie was a mixure of saccharin and soap-boxing combined with ridiculous characters. Now, that would generally describe any Frank Capra movie, but in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, each element was so extreme that even I couldn't stand it.