Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town is the unsung Frank Capra movie. Everyone’s seen It’s a Wonderful Life twenty times, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is patrioticly satisfying, but Mr. Deeds stands with them as a plain old great flick.

Thankfully Capra’s naive socialism is not at it’s heart. Instead it gives simple praise to rural/small-town conservatism. This praise is implicit in most of Capra’s well-known movies–in which small-town heroes stand against greedy business interests and corrupt urban bureaucrats–but it’s the main focus in Mr. Deeds. Here, Longfellow Deeds, a greeting-card poet and tuba player from tiny Mandrake Falls, inherits $20 million from a distant relative. Whisked away to New York City, Deeds is coddled and manipulated by lawyers, the media, and greedy rich people. What happens next is typical Capra: romance, montages involving newspaper headlines, a courtroom scene, and the hero giving a final, defensive, decisive speech. All of it is syrupy, and all of it works.

To take a country boy and put him in a big city is an old storyline, done thousands of times, Mr. Deeds being one of them. In this story, the points of contrast between rural and urban people are in their uses of wealth and their cultural expectations. As a hackneyed poet, Deeds and his simple verse are mocked by high-class modernist poets, whom Deeds gladly punches in the face. Deeds’ financial decisions and his leveling attitude towards servants (he doesn’t want them rolling up his pants for him, thank you very much) raise eyebrows among the lawyer class. No one understands why Deeds wants to turn his opera company from a non-profit into a for-profit organization. No one can fathom why he would jump on a fire engine and help put out a fire. No one can believe that Deeds would give his wealth away to hundreds of poor families during the Great Depression.

For all that misunderstanding, Deeds is charged with insanity. His lawyers and financial consultants, trying to wrest Deeds’ wealth away from him, manufacture a courtcase. They want to take down Deeds using that great intellectual fad of the early 20th century: psychobabble. So a psychologist with a Swiss accent testifies that Deeds has serious mental problems. Who will stand up for Deeds?

Mr. Deeds works just as well today as it did in the mid-30s. Big-city bankers and lawyers, backed by government bureaucrats, represent cultural interests alien to most American folk (e.g., Washington D.C. politics, and the Hollywood of the last 50 years). It is not the case that rural or small-town people are more virtuous; they’re capable of great sins, and as a result the places in which they live can be as hellish as big cities. But good-hearted places like Deeds’ Mandrake Falls still exists. How do they resist the vices and alien cultures of the metropols? Imitating Mr. Deeds is a start: practice Christian charity, write poetry (good or bad), and play the tuba in the local band.

Entertainment: 6

Intelligence: 8

Morality: 9