Mr. Deeds and American Consensus

MR. DEEDS AND AMERICAN CONSENSUS By Charles Maland Charles Maland is author ofAmerican Visions: The Films of Chaplin, Ford, Capra and Welles, 1936-1941. He teaches in the Department ofEnglish at Lake Forest College. Consider this scene: the setting is depression America, and inside an opulent mansion a millionaire and his valet walk down a winding staircase. As they reach the foot of the stairs, a ragged man bursts through the front door opposite them, brandishing a handgun, staring with menacing eyes at his unwilling hosts. With a raspy voice he berates the millionaire for living in such splendor while outside, people wait in breadlines, hoping to stave off, if only temporarily, their aching hunger. The millionaire and his valet stand immobile, helpless, terrified. Does this sound like a scene from a script by Sergei Eisenstein, rejected by Paramount and thrown into the dustbin of unusable scripts like his work on An American Tragedy? It's not. It's from Frank Capra's highly successful film of 1936, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, a film, I'd like to argue, that is one of the central cultural documents of the mid- 1930s. Though Deeds can be approached from a variety of perspectives,] in this essay I'd like briefly to examine the cultural values at work in Deeds and to relate the cultural message expressed in it to the evolution of American culture in the second half of the 1930s. Like a good number of other films in the half-decade before Pearl Harbor—Grapes of Wrath is another example—Deeds is a successful and popular film which on the surface appears radical yet is essentially quite conservative. Both Deeds and Grapes of Wrath recognize the social inequalities and tensions aggravated by the depression but propose traditional solutions to those problems that fit comfortably within the existing structure of American society. Until the confrontation between the gunman and the millionaire, Deeds amuses its audience with a comic juxtaposition of warm small-town values and urban cynicism, much like a number of other successful screwball comedies popular in the mid- and late- 1930s.2 The story is simple. Longfellow Deeds, from Mandrake Falls, Vermont, inherits twenty million dollars, is escorted to New York by a shyster lawyer to claim his fortune, and there is mocked by the board of directors of an opera, a group of effete poets, some greedy relatives, the lawyer, and indeed the whole city, through a series of articles written by a clever newswoman. Upon learning that the newswoman, whom he loved, had deceived and betrayed him, Deeds leaves for home but is stopped by the unemployed gunman. After soothing him, Deeds conceives a plan to distribute his wealth but is jailed on insanity charges. Devastated, he remains silent at the start of his hearing, but later defends himself, is judged sane, and wins the girl. Fade out. In defining the cultural values that animate Deeds, one must focus primarily on the hero, played convincingly by Gary Cooper. A prototype of the small-town moral hero which Capra also created in Jefferson Smith (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) and 7 George Bailey (It's a Wonderful Life). Deeds owns a tallow factory, where he treats his employees kindly, writes poetry on demand for holidays, serves as a volunteer fireman, and plays tuba in the Mandrake Falls town band. His romantic, even chivalric, notion of love emerges when he mentions several times that he's waiting to save a "lady in distress." In business affairs, he is a practical Yankee: when he learns that the opera is losing money, his "common sense" tells him it is being run improperly. In his refusal to let a butler assist in dressing him Deeds shows a democratic distaste for aristocratic distinctions and modes of behavior. His patriotism is clearly evidenced by his desire to visit Grant's Tomb and his awed reverence when he finally does. Finally, Deeds possesses a simple humanitarian morality: talking to Mary Dawson (the pseudonym of newswoman Babe Bennett) about the city vultures he's encountered, Deeds observes, "What puzzles me is why people seem to get so much pleasure out of hurting each other. Why don...