Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
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Short description
Longfellow Deeds is a poet and tuba player living quietly in a small Vermont town until he learns he has inherited a large fortune from his late uncle. He travels to New York to claim it, where lawyers handling the estate, the press and various hangers-on all see an easy mark. A newspaper editor assigns reporter Babe Bennett to get close to him, and she conceals her identity while drawing him out for a series of stories that make him a public laughingstock. Deeds courts the city's ridicule with comic stubbornness, but the deception at the centre of the romance eventually forces a reckoning.
Frank Capra directed the film and produced it, with Robert Riskin writing the screenplay, six years after the pair's earlier collaboration and two years after It Happened One Night. Gary Cooper plays Deeds opposite Jean Arthur as Babe Bennett, with George Bancroft, Lionel Stander, Douglass Dumbrille and Raymond Walburn in support, part of a credited cast of 172.
The film runs 115 minutes. It was released by Columbia Pictures on April 9, 1936, and has held up with audiences: on IMDb it sits at 7.8 from 25,000 votes, and on TMDB at 7.5 from 416 votes. A critics' rating of 8.4 from 21 reviews places it above both audience figures, and the gap is widest against the smaller TMDB sample.
What's left behind the scenes
- Actress Jean Arthur (1900-1991) and director Frank Capra (1897-1991) only saw the film in its entirety in 1972 when they were guests at a film festival.
- Jean Arthur was so afraid of filming that she often vomited before shooting, and in between takes she had to run to the makeup room, where she locked herself in and cried. However, in front of the camera, she behaved quite professionally. One of those who helped her feel comfortable on set was Gary Cooper (1901-1961).
- Harry Cohn (1891-1958), founder, president, and producer of Columbia Pictures, made it a rule to only allow directors to shoot one take, which saved the studio a considerable amount of money, and strictly adhered to this rule. Frank Capra found a way around it. At the end of each take, he would not shout “Cut!” but “Once more!” and the actors would start the scene again.
- One of the ways Frank Capra minimized studio management interference in the filmmaking process was by refusing to work while any of the bosses were present on set. As soon as Harry Cohn or any other executives appeared on set, Capra would announce a half-hour break. These delays cost the film company so much that Cohn rarely appeared on set.
- Director Frank Capra was convinced from the very beginning that Gary Cooper would be perfect in the role of Longfellow Deeds. While waiting for Cooper to become available, the start of filming was delayed by six months, costing the film's budget $100,000.
- Guided by the ideological postulate that justice is impossible in the United States, officials from the Soviet cultural sphere altered the film's ending for domestic release: the hero was imprisoned (a close-up of him behind bars appeared at the end), and the scene of Deeds's fellow townsmen rejoicing at his return from the city was even redubbed (more accurately, resubtitled): they ostensibly expressed outrage at his arrest.
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