A Film Canon

 

 

The first of Capra's American Gospels, Mr. Deeds Goes To Town presents its hero (Gary Cooper) as a secular Christ - a purveyor of deeds, rather than dogmatics - whose Passion involves inheriting an unimaginable sum of money, distributing it to the poor, and being wrongfully imprisoned and tried for insanity, during which time his relative one- dimensionality reaches its logical conclusion as that of a religious icon, reducing him to a noble silhouette, or profile. This crucifixion occurs at the hands of a variety of urban discourses - law, politics, psychiatry, commerce and, above all, the media - such that Deeds' final triumph consists in adopting a quintessentially American 'common sense', whose ultimate object is to elide the connection between thought and action, reducing language to violence; or, alternatively, rediscovering democratic space (the courtroom) as public, conversation-space. Hence his beatifying account of Ulysses S. Grant's trajectory from farmboy, to military leader, to President (by way of Lincoln), which not only construes these acts of violence as so many defences of Union values, but imbues his own magnanimity with Presidential proportions, explaining the architectural similarities between his mansion and the White House, as well as his ability to single-handedly recuperate the losses of the Great Depression. The result is a personal jingoism, in which the refrain of "For He's A Jolly Good Fellow" achieves hymn-like dimensions, tabloid sentimentality is inverted, rather than subverted, and conversation is replaced by so many dead banalities. Hence the anti-screwball ethos, directed squarely at "smart-alecs...busy in the crazy competition for nothing" - especially wisecracking journalist Louise Bennett (Jean Arthur), whose rejection of her profession, and its mode of address, is tantamount to a conversion.