Mr. Deeds Goes To Town (1936)

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town is a 1936 American comedy-drama romance film directed by Frank Capra and starring Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur in her first featured role. Based on the 1935 short story “Opera Hat” by Clarence Budington Kelland, which appeared in serial form in The American Magazine, the screenplay was written by Robert Riskin in his fifth collaboration with Capra.

Plot
Longfellow Deeds is the co-owner of a tallow works, part-time greeting card poet, and tuba-playing inhabitant of the hamlet of Mandrake Falls, Vermont. During the Great Depression he inherits 20 million dollars from his uncle, Martin Semple. Semple’s scheming attorney, John Cedar, locates Deeds and brings him to New York City. Cedar gives his cynical troubleshooter, ex-newspaperman Cornelius Cobb, the task of keeping reporters away from Deeds.

Cobb is outfoxed by star reporter Louise “Babe” Bennett, who appeals to Deeds’ romantic fantasy of rescuing a damsel in distress by masquerading as a poor worker named Mary Dawson. She pretends to faint from exhaustion after “walking all day to find a job” and worms her way into his confidence. Bennett proceeds to write a series of enormously popular newspaper articles on Longfellow, portraying him as a madcap yokel who has suddenly inherited riches, giving him the nickname “Cinderella Man”

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

DK Classics