Post by petrolino on Jun 2, 2018 23:49:59 GMT
The comedy 'Mr. Deeds Goes To Town' is based on a story called 'Opera Hat' (1935) by prolific writer Clarence Budington Kelland who hailed from Portland, Michigan. Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper) is a poet, musician and tallow works operator in Mandrake Falls, Vermont. Deeds inherits $20,000,000 during the Great Depression due to the death of his uncle Martin Semple. Semple's attorney John Cedar (Douglass Dumbrille) and hatchet man Cornelius Cobb (Lionel Stander) whisk Longfellow off to New York where he's preyed upon by reporters looking for a scoop. Leading the line is Pulitzer Prize winner Louise 'Babe' Bennett (Jean Arthur) who intends to set the poor chump up and pick up another prize for her newspaper desk. Babe christens Longfellow, 'The Cinderella Man', but things get complicated when she starts to recognise some of his talents.
"Oh I see a small Ohio farm boy becoming a great soldier. I see thousands of marching men. I see General Lee, with a broken heart, surrendering. And I can see the beginning of a new nation, like Abraham Lincoln said. And I can see that Ohio boy being inaugurated as President. Things like that can only happen in a country like America."
Jean Arthur & George Bancroft
President Ulysses S. Grant
'Redemption Day' - Sheryl Crow
'Mr. Deeds Goes To Town' is a literary comedy of verbal politics, creative reportage and commercial sloganeering in which classical lyricism is allowed to flow and poetry circles are exposed. Director Frank Capra builds a nest from strong source material and delights in screenwriter Robert Riskin's unflappable wordplay. The story tackles some serious issues including employment rights and faults in court procedure, mental illness and manic depression. The final section becomes a courtroom plea for reason and you can see its influence in pictures like Norman Jewison's '... And Justice For All' (1979), Bob Clark's 'From The Hip' (1987), Jonathan Lynn's 'My Cousin Vinny' (1992), Milos Forman's 'The People Vs. Larry Flynt' (1996) and Sidney Lumet's 'Find Me Guilty' (2006). It's still a personal work for Capra though, like pretty much everything Capra did, and Deeds' rapid deconstruction of proclivities and personal habits on the witness stand reassures us all that we have more in common than we usually imagine.
"One hundred and fifty years ago this spring, Ulysses S. Grant took command of all the armies of the United States. He developed a grand strategy to defeat the Confederacy and ultimately, with much struggle, succeeded. As much as any person not named Abraham Lincoln, Grant saved the Union. He went on to serve two terms as president and write some of the most celebrated memoirs in the history of American letters.
More than 1 million people, and possibly as many as 1.5 million, attended his funeral procession in New York in 1885 on a national day of mourning. A million people attended the dedication of his tomb on the northern tip of Manhattan in 1897. And then the veterans of the war died off, and the populace as a whole largely forgot why they had once revered the little man from Ohio.
When Groucho Marx asked on his 1950s TV quiz show, “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?,” he was just being silly (no one is actually buried there — the remains of the 18th president and his wife, Julia, are in sarcophagi). But by then the tomb was no longer one of the most visited sites in New York. It had fallen into disrepair, marred by graffiti and vandalism. That matched the decline in Grant’s reputation among historians."
- Joel Achenbach, The Washington Post
"Before 1990, McDonald’s fried up their french fries in beef tallow. It was a mix of fat and starch perfected over years of experimentation. Then a man in Omaha named Phil Sokolof had a heart attack. His doctor told him that saturated fat and cholesterol were to blame and Sokolof went on a national crusade to take the fat out of America’s food, with McDonald’s on the top of his kill list. And somehow he won."
- Zach Johnston, Uproxx
"Produced at the height of the Depression in 1936, 'Mr. Deeds Goes to Town' connected on a visceral level with downtrodden audiences by celebrating an identifiable, honest-to-a-fault guy who decides to stand up and fight for his brethren. This hopeful film spoke to a hopeless population and buoyed their spirits by assuring them - despite appearances to the contrary - they weren't forgotten. And though the economy is far better today, this classic may well have the same effect on contemporary viewers who feel disenfranchised, left behind, and undervalued."
- David Krauss, 'Mr. Deeds Goes To Town : 80th Anniversary Edition'
"The popularity of 'Mr. Deeds Goes To Town' can be attributed, at least in the United States, in part to the attractive fantasy of wealth redistribution that it offered during the difficult era that saw its release. In contrast to the noble Deeds, big-business types are portrayed as cynical and selfish. Like many of Frank Capra’s films, Mr. Deeds builds to a climax in which the common man battles the forces of injustice."
- Lee Pfeiffer, Encyclopædia Britannica
More than 1 million people, and possibly as many as 1.5 million, attended his funeral procession in New York in 1885 on a national day of mourning. A million people attended the dedication of his tomb on the northern tip of Manhattan in 1897. And then the veterans of the war died off, and the populace as a whole largely forgot why they had once revered the little man from Ohio.
When Groucho Marx asked on his 1950s TV quiz show, “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?,” he was just being silly (no one is actually buried there — the remains of the 18th president and his wife, Julia, are in sarcophagi). But by then the tomb was no longer one of the most visited sites in New York. It had fallen into disrepair, marred by graffiti and vandalism. That matched the decline in Grant’s reputation among historians."
- Joel Achenbach, The Washington Post
"Before 1990, McDonald’s fried up their french fries in beef tallow. It was a mix of fat and starch perfected over years of experimentation. Then a man in Omaha named Phil Sokolof had a heart attack. His doctor told him that saturated fat and cholesterol were to blame and Sokolof went on a national crusade to take the fat out of America’s food, with McDonald’s on the top of his kill list. And somehow he won."
- Zach Johnston, Uproxx
"Produced at the height of the Depression in 1936, 'Mr. Deeds Goes to Town' connected on a visceral level with downtrodden audiences by celebrating an identifiable, honest-to-a-fault guy who decides to stand up and fight for his brethren. This hopeful film spoke to a hopeless population and buoyed their spirits by assuring them - despite appearances to the contrary - they weren't forgotten. And though the economy is far better today, this classic may well have the same effect on contemporary viewers who feel disenfranchised, left behind, and undervalued."
- David Krauss, 'Mr. Deeds Goes To Town : 80th Anniversary Edition'
"The popularity of 'Mr. Deeds Goes To Town' can be attributed, at least in the United States, in part to the attractive fantasy of wealth redistribution that it offered during the difficult era that saw its release. In contrast to the noble Deeds, big-business types are portrayed as cynical and selfish. Like many of Frank Capra’s films, Mr. Deeds builds to a climax in which the common man battles the forces of injustice."
- Lee Pfeiffer, Encyclopædia Britannica
Gary Cooper & Jean Arthur
'The Man In The Wilderness' - Natalie Merchant
With his genial nature, mild-mannered demeanour and lanky frame, Gary Cooper seems tailor-made for the role of Longfellow Deeds and would continue to excel in culture-clash comedies like 'The Cowboy And The Lady' (1938), 'Ball Of Fire' (1941) and 'Love In The Afternoon' (1957). Longfellow Deeds has a bona fide mean streak too, something Cooper relishes in. Carole Lombard was originally set to play the reporter but dropped out to make the Gregory La Cava's seminal screwball comedy 'My Man Godfrey' (1936). This worked out for all concerned as Jean Arthur's perfectly cast as baby-voiced journalist Babe and nobody curls a lip like her. Both Cooper and Arthur would work on other films with Capra.
I often like women's fashions in Capra's films and here my favourite is Jean Arthur's feather cap and matching outfit, best seen when she plays drums in the park. The chemistry between Cooper and Arthur is engaging and they gain pleasant support from Lionel Stander as aggressive fixer Cornelius Cobb, Douglass Dumbrille as slippery conman John Cedar, George Bancroft as crafty editor MacWade and Raymond Walburn as Deeds' effete butler.
"On the basis of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and the films that follow it, there is every reason to believe that Capra's conception of his own situation as an "artist" in film has ominously changed as well. The central figures in Capra's films almost always represent alter egos for the director himself and figure his conception of what it is to be a filmmaker, an artist like himself. The later films are no different from the earlier in this respect. But while the earlier films imagine creation to be an act of largely solitary, individualistic, and autonomous authorship, the later ones imagine the writer-director-producer to be much more like an admittedly idealistic, but also extremely practical and pragmatic politician. The director-figure in these films must involve himself with a tangled web of interpersonal relations, group decision making, and bureaucratic compromises. Capra's ideal of artistic achievement has changed. The artist/filmmaker is less a visionary-dreamer working cut off from the world in a "studio" (in the sense in which a painter or sculptor works in a studio) than a man trapped in the confusion of the other sort of "studio"–in the middle of a crowd of people, down on the floor making endless snap decisions, expressing his dreams not outside of or as an alternative to, but within and by means of, resistant institutional and social structures.
Capra's earlier films esteemed states of reverie and idealism as positive ends in themselves, but his later work rejects such states of dreamy disengagement. George Bailey's, Jefferson Smith's, and Longfellow Deeds' idealistic dreams are imagined to be just dreams, worthy of being patronized by other characters or by viewers of their films as long as they fail concretely to engage themselves with the bureaucratic and social realities of their worlds. It is imperative that they convert their dreams into practicalities. To be adequate as an artist in these later films is to be capable of expressing oneself in the practical forms and structures of institutional and social life. The Deeds, Smith, and Doe trilogy is, in the largest sense, an extended study of a central character's capacities of performance in these changed circumstances: in public, in front of an invariably hostile or indifferent audience from which he is unable to turn away or to remove himself imaginatively, in a situation in which the authorship and interpretation of his particular role is largely out of his hands. The central character's inchoate, yearning dreams and ideals must be translated into alien forms and structures of social and linguistic expression that he is unable to escape or alter."
- Ray Carney, 'American Vision : The Films Of Frank Capra'
"One of the most popular of Frank Capra’s blockbusters, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town saw the director apply his most overt message of social consciousness to an age-old wish-fulfilment narrative. That Deeds (Gary Cooper) himself hardly wishes for the $20m bestowed upon him mattered little to contemporary audiences. Whether the film can be viewed as a liberal statement of solidarity with New Deal economics or mere Republican guilt-appeasement fantasy has been much debated since release, Capra himself flip-flopping between positions depending on his audience through the years. The film remains effective whichever way you look at it, and as emblematic of the tensions in the Capra-Riskin dynamic as they come."
- Matthew Thrift, The British Film Institute
"What James Stewart brought to his early films was empathy. And he brought it by the bucketful. Here was an actor, a personality, whom viewers really cared about. Put him in a cinematic scrape, and they’d bite their fingernails until a happy resolution could be found — after all, who’d want harm to befall someone so gentle-natured? It’s a set-up that was exploited majestically by Frank Capra, the director of Stewart’s first totemic film, 'Mr Smith Goes to Washington' (1939). Here, Stewart plays Jefferson Smith, an idealistic politician who gets battered by the entrenched interests on Capitol Hill. Towards the end of the film, Smith approaches despair, until all is resolved in one of cinema’s most moving finales. Because of Stewart’s uniquely meek presence, the film’s ups-and-downs are gut-wrenching. Capra would repeat the trick with 'It’s a Wonderful Life' (1946), perhaps Stewart’s most enduring film.
After 'Mr Smith Goes to Washington', the plaudits came gushing in — Stewart was a somebody. And he became an even bigger somebody a year later, when he won an Academy Award for his performance as Macaulay Conner — a fast-talking gossip writer — in 'The Philadelphia Story' (1940). Not one for all the hype, Stewart allowed the Oscar to be displayed in the window of his father’s store for the next 25 years."
- Peter Hoskin, The Spectator
Capra's earlier films esteemed states of reverie and idealism as positive ends in themselves, but his later work rejects such states of dreamy disengagement. George Bailey's, Jefferson Smith's, and Longfellow Deeds' idealistic dreams are imagined to be just dreams, worthy of being patronized by other characters or by viewers of their films as long as they fail concretely to engage themselves with the bureaucratic and social realities of their worlds. It is imperative that they convert their dreams into practicalities. To be adequate as an artist in these later films is to be capable of expressing oneself in the practical forms and structures of institutional and social life. The Deeds, Smith, and Doe trilogy is, in the largest sense, an extended study of a central character's capacities of performance in these changed circumstances: in public, in front of an invariably hostile or indifferent audience from which he is unable to turn away or to remove himself imaginatively, in a situation in which the authorship and interpretation of his particular role is largely out of his hands. The central character's inchoate, yearning dreams and ideals must be translated into alien forms and structures of social and linguistic expression that he is unable to escape or alter."
- Ray Carney, 'American Vision : The Films Of Frank Capra'
"One of the most popular of Frank Capra’s blockbusters, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town saw the director apply his most overt message of social consciousness to an age-old wish-fulfilment narrative. That Deeds (Gary Cooper) himself hardly wishes for the $20m bestowed upon him mattered little to contemporary audiences. Whether the film can be viewed as a liberal statement of solidarity with New Deal economics or mere Republican guilt-appeasement fantasy has been much debated since release, Capra himself flip-flopping between positions depending on his audience through the years. The film remains effective whichever way you look at it, and as emblematic of the tensions in the Capra-Riskin dynamic as they come."
- Matthew Thrift, The British Film Institute
"What James Stewart brought to his early films was empathy. And he brought it by the bucketful. Here was an actor, a personality, whom viewers really cared about. Put him in a cinematic scrape, and they’d bite their fingernails until a happy resolution could be found — after all, who’d want harm to befall someone so gentle-natured? It’s a set-up that was exploited majestically by Frank Capra, the director of Stewart’s first totemic film, 'Mr Smith Goes to Washington' (1939). Here, Stewart plays Jefferson Smith, an idealistic politician who gets battered by the entrenched interests on Capitol Hill. Towards the end of the film, Smith approaches despair, until all is resolved in one of cinema’s most moving finales. Because of Stewart’s uniquely meek presence, the film’s ups-and-downs are gut-wrenching. Capra would repeat the trick with 'It’s a Wonderful Life' (1946), perhaps Stewart’s most enduring film.
After 'Mr Smith Goes to Washington', the plaudits came gushing in — Stewart was a somebody. And he became an even bigger somebody a year later, when he won an Academy Award for his performance as Macaulay Conner — a fast-talking gossip writer — in 'The Philadelphia Story' (1940). Not one for all the hype, Stewart allowed the Oscar to be displayed in the window of his father’s store for the next 25 years."
- Peter Hoskin, The Spectator
Frank Capra & Gary Cooper
'Cinderella Man' - Rush
'Mr. Deeds Goes To Town' is photographed by Frank Capra's regular cameraman Joseph Walker and granted a leisurely pace by celebrated cutter Gene Havlick. The fictional town Mandrake reappears in Charles Shyer's appreciative romance 'Baby Boom' (1987) and is referenced through the journey of Babydoll (Emily Browning) in Zack Snyder's extraordinary Vermont fantasy 'Sucker Punch' (2011). The Coen Brothers' breakneck comedy 'The Hudsucker Proxy' (1994) reworks elements of 'Mr. Deeds Goes To Town'. Steven Brill's charming remake 'Mr. Deeds' (2002) is its own entity and comes highly recommended, with Adam Sandler and Winona Ryder stepping in for Cooper and Arthur.
Fashion Gallery : Capra Style
"Frank Capra was a Sicilian-born American film director, and one of the great creative geniuses of Hollywood's Golden Age. He was responsible for several immensely popular and successful movies during the 1930's and 1940's with a unique and memorable combination of social commentary and farce. At the same time populist and humanist, uplifting, fast, and extremely funny, Capra's creations such as 'It Happened One Night' in 1934, 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington' in 1939, and 'It's a Wonderful Life' in 1946 are among Hollywood's most bewitching movies and are nostalgically treasured and ritually reviewed as true cult classics. In addition to his talented filmmaking, Capra was a powerful force in the Director's Guild, the Motion Picture Academy, and the Producer's Guild."
- Chris Whiteley, Hollywood's Golden Age
Barbara Stanwyck
Barbara Stanwyck & Frank Capra
'Ladies Of Leisure' (1930)
Barbara Stanwyck & David Manners in 'The Miracle Woman' (1931)
Adolphe Menjou & Barbara Stanwyck in 'Forbidden' (1932)
Barbara Stanwyck & Nils Asther in 'The Bitter Tea Of General Yen' (1933)
Barbara Stanwyck & Gary Cooper in 'Meet John Doe' (1941)
Fay Wray in 'Dirigible' (1931)
Don Dillaway, Jean Harlow, Loretta Young & Robert Williams in 'Platinum Blonde' (1931)
Claudette Colbert & Clark Gable in 'It Happened One Night' (1934)
'Gypsy' - Suzanne Vega
"Joseph McBride’s astounding new biography, 'Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success', argues that Capra’s movies were actually darker, his motives far gnarlier than careless viewers realize. There was wormwood under all that corn syrup: If he was so upbeat, why do so many of his characters attempt suicide? If he was all for the Little Man, how come his crews put in 85-hour weeks with no overtime? Why did he make New Deal movies when he was a closet Republican who ratted out his pinko colleagues to FBI thought police and shamelessly heisted credit for his writers’ work?
McBride doesn’t really have a taste for the blood sport of literary pathography. He likes the hairpin turns in Capra’s involuted character. He’s a more convincing debunker than, say, Donald Spoto on Hitchcock or Pauline Kael on Orson Welles, because he includes scads of evidence that makes his subject look good. Like wheat, Capra’s soul is sifted and the chaff cast away. The book is a kind of sober companion volume to the movie man’s disingenuous memoir, 'The Name Above the Title'.
McBride catches him in a fascinating array of lies. Capra claimed he never went a penny over budget; Lost Horizon went 62 percent over budget. Capra said he never got a dime from Columbia in profit percentages; in fact he was the only 1930s Columbia director still earning profits in the 1980s — $74,467 in 1984 alone. Implacable as an IRS auditor, McBride sets the record straight.
Not that his account doesn’t have some kinks of its own. McBride says that Capra’s gag writing for Mack Sennett somehow expressed pent-up sexual frustrations, that castration anxieties lurk in the director’s silent pictures starring Harry Langdon, and that the dotty old homicidal ladies in Arsenic and Old Lace correspond to Capra’s mother. McBride speaks in Freudian tongues. Still, for the most part he seems on the level. His theory that the director’s calamitous collapse after 1946 resulted from guilt over his role in the Red scare is persuasive. And he deftly explicates Capra’s genius. His book offers a glimpse, reminiscent of It’s a Wonderful Life, of what movies might have been like had Capra never lived ..."
McBride doesn’t really have a taste for the blood sport of literary pathography. He likes the hairpin turns in Capra’s involuted character. He’s a more convincing debunker than, say, Donald Spoto on Hitchcock or Pauline Kael on Orson Welles, because he includes scads of evidence that makes his subject look good. Like wheat, Capra’s soul is sifted and the chaff cast away. The book is a kind of sober companion volume to the movie man’s disingenuous memoir, 'The Name Above the Title'.
McBride catches him in a fascinating array of lies. Capra claimed he never went a penny over budget; Lost Horizon went 62 percent over budget. Capra said he never got a dime from Columbia in profit percentages; in fact he was the only 1930s Columbia director still earning profits in the 1980s — $74,467 in 1984 alone. Implacable as an IRS auditor, McBride sets the record straight.
Not that his account doesn’t have some kinks of its own. McBride says that Capra’s gag writing for Mack Sennett somehow expressed pent-up sexual frustrations, that castration anxieties lurk in the director’s silent pictures starring Harry Langdon, and that the dotty old homicidal ladies in Arsenic and Old Lace correspond to Capra’s mother. McBride speaks in Freudian tongues. Still, for the most part he seems on the level. His theory that the director’s calamitous collapse after 1946 resulted from guilt over his role in the Red scare is persuasive. And he deftly explicates Capra’s genius. His book offers a glimpse, reminiscent of It’s a Wonderful Life, of what movies might have been like had Capra never lived ..."
- Tim Appelo, Entertainment Weekly
Jean Arthur
Frank Capra, James Stewart & Jean Arthur
Gary Cooper & Jean Arthur in 'Mr. Deeds Goes To Town' (1936)
James Stewart & Jean Arthur in 'You Can't Take It With You' (1938)
James Stewart & Jean Arthur exit the set of 'Mr. Smith Goes To Washington' (1939)
Ronald Colman & Jane Wyatt in 'The Lost Horizon' (1937)
Cary Grant & Priscilla Lane in 'Arsenic And Old Lace' (1944)
James Stewart & Gloria Grahame in 'It's A Wonderful Life' (1946)
'Fast As You Can' - Fiona Apple
"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream, it takes over as the number one hormone; it bosses the enzymes; directs the pineal gland; plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to film is more film."
- Frank Capra
