The Family Flint: April 2022

Friday, April 29, 2022

Film review: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)

This is one of the well-known Frank Capra films, but our main motivation for watching it was Jean Arthur, who is in many of our fave 30s and 40s films. I was sold on this when I saw it classified as a "screwball" (my favorite genre), but I have to say that was largely misleading. There is a thread of broad comedy running through this, but in general it's closer to It's a Wonderful Life than Capra's genuine screwball masterpiece, It Happened One Night. Several later Capra themes are to the fore: the dignity of small-town life, the smugness of the rich New York elite, the little guy against the system, the virtues of charity and general decency. It veers dangerously into treacly territory, but is so expertly staged, and has such a crackerjack climax that it broke through my cynicism and had me gripped, despite its almost-two-hours running time. It lacks the snappy repartee of the best 30s movies, but is packed with top-notch character actors, and Jean Arthur definitely comes through in the end. I'm generally lukewarm on Gary Cooper - as Jami said, he's curiously impenetrable for an actor, and is perhaps best suited to the stoic gunslinger role he played to perfection in High Noon, but as The Cowboy and the Lady proved, he can do comedy, too. And in general, he is preferable as a vehicle for pure Capra corn than Jimmy Stewart, who can get too overwrought. In that respect Cooper's natural taciturnity and general low affect are a Godsend.

Anyway, the film begins, as did another recent film we watched, with a high-speed crash that kills a multi-millionaire. The search is then on for his heir, and it turns out to be a nephew, Gary Cooper's Longfellow Deeds, living in a small town called Mandrake Falls, Vermont. The lawyers who control the millionaire's estate (the firm of Cedar, Cedar, Cedar and Budington, the main Cedar of whom turns into the film's main antagonist, and whose ulterior motive is concealing from the heir that there's a couple of million missing from the money, presumably because of CCC&B's malpractice or outright corruption), along with the millionaire's "buffer", ex-newspaper man Cornelius "Corny" Cobb (played by gravel-voiced Lionel Stander, who looked very familiar, and I now see he played the butler in the pretty terrible '80s TV show Hart to Hart, but can be forgiven a lot for having been a card-carrying commie who spoke out against the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in between those two roles), who, after an initial period of extreme skepticism, comes entirely over to Longfellow's side, journey out to Mandrake Falls to vet him and butter him up.

They find that he is an eccentric in a town of eccentrics, a poetry-writing tallow-works owning tuba player, who cares more about leaving the town band without a tuba-player than he does at inheriting $20 million.

They think they can easily pull the wool over his eyes but they, just like the opera society that thinks they can easily hit him up for thousands of dollars just by making him chair, and the famous poets who think they can snicker snidely at him without him cottoning on, soon find out that, rough and ready he may be on the outside (and prone to biffing people on the nose if they piss him off), but no fool he. The only one who really does pull the wool over his eyes is reporter Louise "Babe" Bennett, who goes undercover as poor worker Mary Dawson and plays on his sympathies by "fainting" from hunger. Of course, while she begins by gleefully documenting his antics (including his first time getting drunk, which ended up with him wandering about the streets of New York sans all but his boxers), and gives him the name "Cinderella Man", which he particularly detests, she quickly falls for him and his small-town decency,

culminating in a nice scene where she demonstrates her drumming ability as they both sing along in a park (while the photographers she has follow them around are hiding in the bushes). She eventually decides to quit

and break it to him at a meal during which he plans on proposing to her, but Cobb finds out first and breaks it to Longfellow, and he won't speak to her after that. In fact, he's about to head back to Mandrake Falls when a desperate man whose small farm has been taken away from him breaks in and gives him an outraged speech (one of the things Longfellow did while drunk was feed doughnuts to a horse, which stung this man in particular given how many people are starving).

This gives Longfellow the idea of giving away all his money in the form of parcels of land, seed and livestock to poor applicants who want to farm. This, however, drives the Cedars into action, because they're terrified that this will reveal the cooked books, and they team up with distant relatives who were hoping to be the ones who inherited, and accuse Longfellow of being insane and thus unsuitable to inherit the money. The culminating act of the film is a lengthy courtroom scene where we witness first Cedar's apparently successful painting of Longfellow (with the help of witnesses, including the reluctant Babe Bennett) as crazy, with Longfellow just too despondent to fight back, but when Cedar gets Babe to admit that she loves Longfellow (and thus her testimonial that in fact all the things she wrote to make him look crazy were wildly exaggerated, cannot be trusted), Longfellow decides to put up a fight, and his natural good sense cuts through the tissue of bullshit, and the judge is swayed the other way. (One interesting section is where he responds to the image that his constant tuba-playing has helped conjure of him with the point that it helps him concentrate, just as the judge's filling-in-of-O's helps him concentrate, and the eminent Austrian psychiatrist (who has testified that Longfellow is a classic case of manic depressive) is an inveterate doodler (a word that the screenwriter invented for this film - probably its most lasting contribution to culture). We also get a discursion on the word "pixilated," an adjective applied to him by two spinster sisters of Mandrake Falls, whom Cedar calls in as witnesses. Their testimony is undercut when Longfellow gets them to admit that they also believe the judge is pixilated.) The judge concludes that Longfellow is, in fact, the sanest person he's ever met, and the film ends with Jean Arthur swept up in Gary Cooper's arms. Very satisfying hokum.