Mr. Deeds Goes to Town Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		5.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.5

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman December 7, 2016

Frank Capra is often thought of as having elevated the plight of the ordinary, everyday working man in a number of his films, but it’s notable that in many of these films, the central Everyman character has at least something a bit unusual going on in his life. That disconnect between “everyday” and “extraordinary” is probably nowhere as pronounced as in Capra’s 1936 opus Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, a film which follows the adventures of a small town tuba aficionado and would be poet named Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper), who rather improbably ends up inheriting an impossibly huge stack of cash from a recently deceased relative. Robert Riskin’s screenplay is inevitably a product of its time, casting this unexpected good fortune within the context of the Great Depression, and, as with at least some other Riskin — Capra collaborations, positing a supposedly muckraking journalist as a conflicted quasi-nemesis, while the real villain schemes in the background. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town may seem quaint to many younger contemporary viewers, but its portrayal of solid American values, couched in a kind of homespun if probably unrealistic familiarity, is remarkable. The film also marked the first of three starring roles in Capra films for the ebullient Jean Arthur, who, after a decade and a half or so in a series of largely forgettable (and at times uncredited) jobs, suddenly burst into the mainstream as Babe Bennett, that aforementioned conflicted journalist who is assigned to cover Deeds and who ends up both falling in love with him and excoriating him in a series of newspaper articles, something that plays directly into the hands of Deeds’ nefarious attorney John Cedar (Douglas Dumbrille).

One of the interesting dialectics in some Capra films is how the supposed “hick” is a veritable fount of wisdom, while the high falutin’ city types, for all their machinating and scheming, are often unabashed dolts when you get right down to it. There’s nothing very revolutionary about this thesis, though it may have had more credence back in 1936 than it does today, but Riskin’s screenplay offers such finely wrought characters that some of the homilies and maybe even the screeds go down pretty easily.

That includes the in some ways naive but in other ways quite wise Longfellow, as well as the jaded Babe, who needs a refresher course in innocence from Longfellow. When Cedar brings Longfellow back to the “big city” (a den of iniquity, of course), he assigns his wise cracking “enforcer” Cornelius Cobb (Lionel Stander) to keep the press at bay, if for no other reason than that Cedar has nefarious designs on the Deeds riches. Babe of course circumvents that embargo, but not with (initially) honorable intentions. It’s in some ways the same scenario Riskin would exploit in another Capra feature starring Cooper, Meet John Doe, though in other ways it's more of a mirror image of the 1941 film, given the fact that Deeds is only the “invention” of the reporter in terms of how she goes about writing about him.

As beloved as Mr. Deeds Goes to Town has been for so many for so long, I’m not above suggesting the film may have a few narrative hiccups here and there—nothing major, mind you, just a couple of odd missteps that don’t measurably harm the film, but which don’t really add that much either. Since there’s already the “real” villain, John Cedar, and the ambiguously conflicted “kind of” villain, Babe, what really did the brief vignettes with the other nephew (along with his harridan wife) who didn’t get the inheritance actually provide in terms of plot mechanics? And the whole hyperbolic chain of events which leads to Deeds’ supposed nervous breakdown seems overwrought at best and pretty forced at worst, especially considering how quickly he snaps out of it once Babe starts mounting a vigorous defense at a sanity hearing.

The humor in the film is rather gentle, and in fact a lot of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town actual plays more in a sweetly romantic environment than in the sort of screwball comedy Capra exploited in It Happened One Night and You Can't Take It with You. The performances, as they uniformly are in Capra’s films, are all wonderful, with Cooper bringing out the childlike side of Deeds winningly in such famous moments as the scene where Longfellow slides down the elegant bannister of his new mansion. Arthur is almost iconic in this role, capably documenting Babe’s initial ambition at having a “scoop,” but then her increasingly conflicted feelings about it all once she starts to fall for her “story”. The supporting cast is filled to the brim with that unbelievable caliber of character actor that seemed to be part and parcel of so many 1930s classics. Stander is brusque but lovable, and Dumbrille makes for a wonderfully officious shyster, one whose comeuppance probably got cheers from the audience back in 1936, and which still resonates pretty strongly even in the jaded 21st century.

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Sony-Columbia with an AVC encoded 1080p in 1.37:1. Sourced from a new 4K restoration, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town offers a generally superior viewing experience, with a nicely resolved grain field, good contrast and generally nice detail levels. It appears that some varying source elements may have been utilized, as there are occasional fluctuations (slight at times, more noticeable at other times) in density, contrast, clarity and grain structure. The film has a rather large amount of opticals, including things like wipes and dissolves, and some of those include rather long leads before "bumping" out to primary elements (both pre- and post-optical), and there are therefore a few moments that look grainier and softer during those transitions. Restorative efforts have scrubbed the elements of any major (and indeed pretty much all minor) damage, and secure compression assures solid resolution even in potentially problematic sequences like a nighttime scene with Longfellow and Babe that's shrouded in mist. Those more sensitive to an at times heterogeneous appearance due to varying source elements and things like ubiquitous opticals might not be quite as pleased as I am with this video presentation, but even those folks will probably admit (maybe under duress) to nitpicking due to the otherwise excellent and nicely organic appearance of this transfer.

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town features a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track which sounds fine for the most part, but which can't quite overcome some age related issues that reveal both the boxy sound of the recording technologies of the day as well as byproducts like hiss, something that's still pretty prevalent throughout the presentation. These understandable concerns aside, the track has no real issues to document, with dialogue coming through just fine and Howard Jackson's score sounding okay if not especially full bodied. There's occasional very slight distortion evident at some higher amplitude moments, but it's a transitory and (in my estimation) not very troubling phenomenon.

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

This release ports over previously existing supplements from the DVD release(s), while adding a trailer:

• Audio Commentary by Frank Capra, Jr.


• Frank Capra, Jr. Remembers. . ."Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" (480i; 11:11)


• Vintage Image Gallery (480i; 11:11)


• Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) Trailer Theatrical Re-Release (1080p; 1:28)

Additionally, this comes housed in a DigiBook which contains a good essay by Jeremy Arnold and some production and promotional stills.

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There's probably no more salient example of what curmudgeons say "has happened to Hollywood" than in realizing that Frank Capra's immortal classic became the pretty lackluster Mr. Deeds in 2002 with Adam Sandler in the Cooper role. This is one case where the original is inarguably the better, from any number of standpoints. Some of this 1936 film is probably going to strike younger viewers as being impossibly quaint, but there are worse things (like needless remakes). Sony has once again delivered a quality restoration, and fans should be very well pleased with the results. Highly recommended.