-Devdutt Trivedi
Frank Capra’s Mr Deeds goes to Town (1936), is his follow up to his first major success It Happened One Night (1934), and is the first of his films centered on the character of the common man. Capra would follow up the success of this 1936 venture with Cooper in the lead with similarly constructed films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Meet John Doe (1946). The film combines Hollywood’s agenda of representing and defining, through narrative structures, the nature of the American dream combined with the approach of German author, Franz Kafka especially in his emphasis on social hierarchy and class dynamics.
Frank Capra adapted American Mercury magazine’s serial story Opera Hat by Clarence Budington Kendall which appeared in the April to September issue of 1935.The film was made in a response to the Depression Era between 1929 and the late ‘30s, following the Wall Street crash on September 4, 1929, after which unemployment in America rose to as much as 25%. Capra was drawn to the material since he found it a simple story which had interesting points in it. He chose Gary Cooper for the part since he thought Cooper ‘looked honest.’ The film transforms the American dream to one of social equality in response to a belief following the Great Depression that the economic downturn occurred because of economic inequality in society which led the American economy to produce more than it could consume. In this way with Mr. Deeds Goes to Town Capra laid the foundation for his masterpiece It’s a Wonderful Life.
The narrative around the character of Longfellow Deeds, a poetry writer for post cards, who inherits a fortune and is eventually accused of being fit for the asylum, has found resonance in the often jingoistic films of recent Bombay cinema. These Bombay films are constructed keeping Capra’s model in mind i.e. one where the protagonist standing for the common man engages with a string of uncommon situations aided by fairly uni- dimensional characters that often have their negativity written on their sleeves.
Longfellow Deeds’ reflections on the cityscape lack shades of gray that would make the film much more interesting but also more sophisticatedly etched out by Capra. The film predates Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane in its portrayal of yellow journalism as being a rampant feature of the cityscape. The city is presented as a nasty space, where the opportunity to meet ‘famous people’ is coloured with the opportunistic methods and arrogance of these important people. Deeds’ approach to answer their arrogance with a sock on the nose indicates urban violence as being caused by the complexity of class structures across the urban landscape. This complexity of the city is also brought out through the complexity of language, where language complicates action, often making it not just transactional, but also convoluted. The film combines the small town petit-bourgeoisie dream of being wealthy, by surrounding the small town character with materials that would conventionally belong to the aristocracy.
While studying Capra’s developing technique in the film, one notices his preference for the mid-shot where he places the camera not too close or too far away from the character. This technique which would be carried forward by even the most mediocre of Hollywood
directors, allows the audience to focus on the actor’s performance instead of the totality of matter in the image. In this way the actor’s performance and the characterization of players is given more importance than the rhythm and flow of the film. The film is based on the tradition of the Victorian novel, where a number of small events lead to a mini-climax which converge at a climax towards the end of the film. This is also seen on the soundtrack where the premonition of something happening is followed immediately by a sound or image that confirms the importance of the information in the previous image.
The film is also a development alongside the screwball comedies of Lubitsch in which a perfectly absurd set of utterances on the dialogue track would be followed by a calm acceptance of the normalness of these utterances. The humour would build up over a number of sequences which consisted of this acceptance of the absurdity of the utterances within their respective logics of construction.
In the case of Deeds, the absurd logic of the situations suggests a social commentary through the character of the common man with uncommon experiences. The recognition of this hierarchy like in the court situation can be inverted precisely because this chosen common man has uncommon power.
An anomaly pops up if one thinks through this succession: although the film speaks of the common man with uncommon power, the director and actor do not position themselves in relation to this common man. In this way the makers seem to be conspiring to maintain a status quo between the privileged members of society, i.e. the makers and producers at the Hollywood studio amongst other ‘privileged’ members of society, and the audience which comprises of the proletariat. This argument is valid for a few exceptions in the Hollywood Studio System, such as Frank Capra and John Ford (both of whom seem to find solace in using that good old tune that stood for American nationalism: ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’), and is certainly not the norm across Hollywood.
The characters in these studio produced pictures would find their successor, a much more developed version of the same character, in the subsequent films produced by the same studio. The character of the journalist Louise Babe Bennett in Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, would be recycled as Hildy Johnson in Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday (1940) also produced by Columbia.
The film was remade in 2002 and titled Mr. Deeds which had Adam Sandler in the lead.
Courtesy
Frank Capra Jr., Columbia Tristar Pictures