Around the dawn of the New Deal, a naïve bumpkin inherits a cool $20 million (nearly half a billion dollars today) from a hitherto unknown relative. He is harassed by big-city swindlers and ridiculed by supercilious sophisticates. Then, confronted by a starving would-be assassin (one of the Depression’s archetypal “forgotten men”), he decides to give his fortune to the unemployed and is pilloried by the establishment for his “insane desire to become a public benefactor.”
Such is the arc of Frank Capra’s 1936 comedy “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” starring Gary Cooper as Longfellow Deeds, a greeting-card poet from the fictional town of Mandrake Falls, Vt. Showing from Dec. 27 to Jan. 2 at Film Forum, the movie is vintage Americana. An unscarred 35-millimeter print adds to the old timey feel, but there are ways in which “Deeds” feels as fresh as the rhetoric in last month’s presidential election.
Closer to political cartoon than allegory, “Deeds” opens with a dramatic crash and promptly establishes a dichotomy between slick lawyers and small-town innocents. That dynamic only intensifies once Deeds, the newly minted multimillionaire, comes to the attention of New York’s sneering cultural elite and cynical press — mocked as a “cornfed bohunk,” and then, thanks to the wily reporter Babe Bennett (Jean Arthur), cast in the press as the clueless “Cinderella Man.”
Just as Capra’s previous film “It Happened One Night” (1934) marked the end of the anarchic comedies of the early 1930s, so “Deeds” turns the tables on the period’s hard-boiled word-slinging metropolitan melodramas. The plain-spoken Deeds towers above the wiseguys. Pauline Kael would blame Capra for neutering the rakish young Cooper of “Morocco” (1930), but “Deeds” paved the way for the implacable integrity Cooper would personify in later movies like “The Fountainhead” (1949) and “High Noon” (1952).
Although the New York Times critic Frank S. Nugent took “Deeds” as little more than a “shrewd and lively comedy,” others saw a message. Capra may have voted Republican, but his movie — which opened seven months before the 1936 presidential election — was widely taken for New Deal or even socialist propaganda.
Rather than left-wing fantasy, however, “Deeds” is a populist myth. We know that Babe has a heart once she reveals that she is also from a small town and understands that Deeds speaks the language of the people when he uses the vernacular term “doodler,” as in one who draws doodles, and is obliged to define it for the New York swells. (The word did not appear in The New York Times until the mid-1950s.)
Deeds may quote Thoreau, compose sappy Mothers’s Day cards, play tuba in an amateur band and shed a patriotic tear at Grant’s Tomb, but, quick with his fists, he is a real guy. The San Antonio chapter of Cooper’s fan club was onto something when, inspired by “Deeds,” they organized a campaign to elect their hero president. Decades later, Ronald Reagan would use the movie to defend “volunteerism.” The country-boy billionaire Ross Perot was the Longfellow Deeds of 1992.
For decades, Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” has been America’s foremost Christmas movie. “Deeds,” centered on a folksy plutocrat who is compared to Santa Claus several times, “Deeds” may even be more appropriate.
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