Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)

Director:

Frank Capra

Writers:

Robert Riskin (screenplay)
Clarence Budington Kelland (story)

Release Date:

12 April 1936 (USA)

Genre:

Comedy | Romance

Tagline:

Rocking America with laughter!

Plot:

Longfellow Deeds, a simple-hearted Vermont tuba player, inherits a fortune and has to contend with opportunist city slickers.

Plot Keywords:

Tuba | Small Town | Reporter | Vermont | Poet

Awards:

Won Oscar. Another 3 wins & 5 nominations

Cast

Gary Cooper	...	Longfellow Deeds
Jean Arthur	...	Babe Bennett
George Bancroft	...	MacWade
Lionel Stander	...	Cornelius Cobb
Douglass Dumbrille	...	John Cedar
Raymond Walburn	...	Walter
H.B. Warner	...	Judge May
Ruth Donnelly	...	Mabel Dawson
Walter Catlett	...	Morrow
John Wray	...	Farmer

Runtime:

115 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Noiseless Recording)

Certification:

Argentina:Atp | South Korea:12 | UK:U | USA:Approved (PCA #1966) | Australia:G

Company:

Columbia Pictures Corporation

Trivia:

From the start, Frank Capra was convinced that Gary Cooper would be perfect for the part of Longfellow Deeds. Production had to wait six months for Cooper to become available, incurring costs of $100,000 for the delay in filming.

Goofs:

Continuity: When waking up from his bender, Deed's hair changes.

Quotes:

[reading Babe's first column about Deeds]
MacWade: "At two o'clock this morning, Mr. Deeds held up traffic while he fed a bagful of doughnuts to a horse. When asked why he was doing it, he replied, 'I just wanted to see how many doughnuts this horse would eat before he asked for a cup of coffee.'"

Movie Connections:

Referenced in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966)

Soundtrack:

For He's a Jolly Good Fellow

This really is is what being human is all about !

Unvrivalled in the history of cinema and having just watched it again for the umpteenth time, I thought a short review on IMDb was necessary. I have watched the film regularly for the last twenty years and never tire of its humour, its tenderness, its wit, its romance, its general actors' performance and the originality of its subject matter. Never have tears and laughs been so much intermingled in the same film..I was gushing tears in the scene where Deeds hands a poem which Babe reads in the fog on her doorstep ... a few minutes later Deeds goes running off home, tripping up over a dustbin in the process and I was howling with laughter ... likewise the long passage in the courtroom when Deeds finally decides to "speak up" has me in fits of laughter over its finesse and wit. The final scene, where Deeds comes back to the almost empty courtroom to "collect" Babe who had been sitting by herself there once again started off my waterworks as he picks her up and tenderly embraces her all over the place. Indeed that final "kiss" is one of the photos featured on France's 3rd TV channel's "Cinéma-Club" on most Sunday nights.

They are truly indeed a BEAUTIFUL couple in all senses of the world. I will not go through the story of the film again as this has been more than amply related by others but suffice it to say I have never seen any other film made with quite this calibre and actors' performance. Ineed this is the type of film that could only be made once ! Each character is extremely well developed and each actor/actress has exactly the physique of the character they play - an absolutely perfect match, one of those "one-off" films where everything combines to make for the spectator's perfect pleasure.

What a shame that in the twenty first century we cannot produce films of this calibre using story line, actors' performance and plot alone - to obtain thrills from present-day audiences, large quantities of excessive noise, flashing lights and especially computer-generated imagery are necessary .... all this at the expense of plot and of the humour and witty lines. But, with modern technology being a double-edged knife, we should nevertheless thank God for it's enabling us to henceforth be able to appreciate these "golden oldies" for years to come !