Review: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town 1936
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
National Board of Review Magazine May 1936 (Their web site here)
Written by James Shelley Hamilton
I t took an avalanche of awards and medals, rushing down upon It Happened One Night, to put Frank Capra up among the critically crowned, though his producers had been aware of his value to them for some time. The glory was spread out to include a best piece of acting for an actress and another for an actor. The medals should have all been boiled down into one, and given to Capra with probably a ribbon to Robert Riskin...
By now it is fairly well known that Capra is one of our most individual directors. He has that rare thing, a style of his own, which appears to grow out of his gift for warming up a plot with a goodnatured spirit, disguising its frailties with all sorts of human and amusing by-play, and keeping the whole thing plausible and pleasant by a genial semblance of common sense...
...It is a Saturday Evening Postish story, but it has quite an important theme - a young man and his ideals. Beneath that runs the good old theme of the honest country lad and the city slickers. He is so completely a country lad that he has never been outside his own little town, but he inherits a vast fortune and goes to the city, where his native Yankee wit serves him quite well in keeping his head above the plots and counterplots that swirl around him. Until he finds the dream girl has been deceiving him along with the others....
...Capra's genial gift is at work again, keeping things going at such a lively pace that there is no time to stop and think, and at the same time weaving a spell of likeableness and plausibility that is just beginning to wear a bit thin when the story sweeps into the trial scene - and then you sit up for some good, gripping drama that keeps you sitting up till the end...
[Our page on the film with complete credits is here]
Original page 2007 | Updated April 2013
