Gary Cooper - Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936) DVDRip (SiRiUs sHaRe)

Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936)



Longfellow Deeds lives in a small town, leading a small town kind of life - including playing the tuba in the town band. When a relative dies and leaves Deeds a fortune, Longfellow picks up his tuba and moves to the big city where he becomes an instant target for everyone from the greedy opera committee to the sensationist daily newspaper. Deeds outwits them all until Babe Bennett comes along. Babe is a hot-shot reporter who figures the best way to get close to Deeds is to pose as a damsel in distress. When small-town boy meets big-city girl anything can, and does, happen.



Gary Cooper ... Longfellow Deeds / Cinderella Man

Jean Arthur ... Louise 'Babe' Bennett / Mary Dawson

George Bancroft ... MacWade aka Mac

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



Director: Frank Capra



Nominated for 2 Oscars, won 1 Oscar for Best Director



http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0027996/
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Codecs: XVid / MP3



One of Frank Capra's strengths as a film director was the great team he assembled. Not only did he have a great technical group behind him, but his casts combined talent that went from the major stars to the bit players.



In this fable, Mr. Capra gives an answer to those of us that always pondered: what would one do if one inherited a lot of money, or if one won the lottery (fat chance!) It must be terrifying to suddenly have a lot of wealth, in this case 20 million during the worst days of the Great Depression. Sometimes it's better to stay poor rather than have to deal with strangers that have designs on one's newly found wealth!



Gary Cooper has never been as charming as the tuba playing, country bumpkin whose life is changed dramatically when he has to go to Manhattan to claim his inheritance. His Longfellow Deeds gets to see first hand how the high society, his uncle belonged to, deals with this unsophisticated greeting card writing poet.



Jean Arthur was a natural comedienne. She is wonderful in this movie as the reporter who tricks Deeds into speaking with her and in the process falls in love with the man, the object of the ridicule she writes about.



Leonard Standing, one of the best character actors of the era, is equally effective as Cobb, the man who knows a thing or two about those society folks. George Bancroft was also good as MacWade.



The film has a pace that never lets the viewer down. In comparison with what passes today as film comedy, this is a masterpiece. It shows the genius of Frank Capra in charge of this group of people that make us treasure films like this one even if it's pure nonsense, which after all, was what the director was looking for to make us laugh.



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I think of 'Mr. Deeds Goes To Town' as the happier, shinier side of a 'Gary Cooper coin' that features 'Meet John Doe' as the cynical, grubby under side. Both movies feature women who use newspaper stories to distort or manipulate the two leading males, both played by Cooper. In each movie, the two women (Barbara Stanwyck in 'Doe' and Jean Arthur in 'Deeds') end up falling in love with Cooper, as the women start believing in their creation, or in the case of 'Deeds', finally seeing Deeds as he really is. Furthermore, both movies turn an everyday man into a hero of the people. It would seem that Cooper was the perfect fit for whatever vehicle Frank Capra had in mind, so long as it was about a 'hero of the people'.



But as far as 'Mr. Deeds' is concerned, there's so much to like about this film that it hardly matters at all to point out any minor detraction of the film. Capra works his usual magic from a well-assembled cast that includes Jean Arthur as Louis 'Babe' Bennett, and in one of his best roles to date, Lionel Standard as Cornelius Cobb. Fans of Standard may see a similarity between the character of 'Cornelius Cobb' and that of the 'Bodyguard' he played in Harold Lloyd's, 'The Milky Way'. Lloyd's film came out only two month's prior to the release of 'Mr. Deeds'.



With Capra's magic touch we are able to see a wonderful transformation take place inside the courtroom. Stacked with the odds against him, Deeds outwits his detractors by simply pointing out the idiosyncrasies of everyone in the courtroom involved in his virtual lynching. His simple homespun logic and mannerly approach to the proceedings works like Kryptonite over the jaded and corrupt super city slickers looking for the soft spot on his neck.



Although it is true that Capra has a 'magic touch' for appealing to the film going masses of yesterday, as well as today, his deftness in the art of emotional manipulation is a chief by product of that 'magic touch'. How can you not feel good about the character Longfellow Deeds when he's leaving his hometown while the local concert band is playing the song, "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow"? To add more emotional punch to the send off, Capra has Deeds playing tuba to his own going away party. Deeds also plays, "Auld Lang Syne" at his hometown farewell. It would appear that Capra enjoyed using this tune, as he also did so in 'It's A Wonderful Life' ten years later.



Watch the scene where Deeds gets the hired help to yell and whoop it up inside his mansion just so they can all hear and enjoy the sound of their own voices echoing from wall to wall. It is a fantastic scene, but just one of many in this movie where you can feel layers upon layers of cynicism melting away from your soul.



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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 !



* Originally Frank Capra was going to make "Lost Horizon" after Broadway Bill (1934) but Ronald Colman couldn't get out of his other filming commitments. So Capra decided to make this film instead.



* 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.



* Carole Lombard was originally down to play the female lead but she backed out three days before production began to go work on My Man Godfrey (1936). Shooting had to begin without a female lead in place.



* Columbia head Harry Cohn was set against Jean Arthur being cast as the female lead. Capra was finally able to persuade him by insisting that Cohn listen to her voice not study her face.



* The film cost over $800,000 which was a very high figure for 1936.



* Screenwriter Robert Riskin considered this to be his favorite film.



* Jean Arthur never saw the film until she and Capra were guests at a 1972 film festival.



* Harry Cohn had a dictum in that he would only allow his directors to print any one of their takes, thereby saving the studio a great deal of money. Capra found a loophole in getting round this. At the end of each take, instead of shouting "Cut" he would shout "Do it again", and the actors would launch immediately into an unbroken repetition of the scene.



* This film introduced the words "pixellated" and "doodling" to the world, both of which feature prominently in the court hearing scene.



* First film for which 'Harry Cohn' authorized Frank Capra to have his name above the title.



* According to a Motion Picture Herald news item, the film was banned in Germany "on the ground that non-Aryan actors had participated" in the production.



* Columbia and Capra intended to make a sequel to this movie, starring Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur, entitled "Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington" , based on the story "The Gentleman from Wyoming" (alternately called "The Gentleman from Montana" by both contemporary and modern sources) by Lewis Foster. This story was instead turned into the 1939 film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), directed by Frank Capra and starring Arthur and James Stewart.



* In the movie, Mr. Deeds couldn't find a word to rhyme with "Budington". This is the writer's middle name (Writers: Clarence Budington Kelland (story)).