Mr. Deeds Goes to Town at 90

In show biz, when you’re hot, you’re hot – and in 1936, director Frank Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin teamed up for a box-office streak that blazed like a three-alarm fire.

Born two months apart in 1897, this dynamic duo had recently swept the Oscars for It Happened One Night, the rom-com that made history as the first film to score the “Big Five” Academy Awards for Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director and Screenplay. For an encore, Capra and Riskin struck big-screen gold again with the tale of a greeting card poet who inherits $20 million – and a heapin’ helping of heartache – in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

Countless fans know Gary Cooper as a two-time Oscar-winning legend (Sergeant York, High Noon), and Jean Arthur from acclaimed performances in You Can’t Take It With You and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But ninety years ago, Coop had yet to earn his superstar stripes, and Arthur had spent 13 years, toiling away in 70 movies, yet never quite busting through to A-List status.

Mr. Deeds would change all that.

Luckily, Capra could picture only one actor in the title role, calling Coop “The first, last and only choice to play Longfellow Deeds.” Or as Capra put it, “Every line in his face spelled honesty. So innate was his integrity, he could play phony parts, but never look phony himself. [The character] had to symbolize incorruptibility, and in my mind, Gary Cooper was that symbol.”

Prior to landing this tailor-made part, Coop played opposite beauties like Carole Lombard and bombshells like Marlene Dietrich in steamy dramas. Known more for his gorgeous face than his acting skills, Mr. Deeds would change his image from Hollywood hottie to All-American Hero...though Coop modestly claimed, “I’m just an ordinary Joe who became a movie star.”

For Jean Arthur, being cast as street-smart reporter Babe Bennett in the Capra-Riskin production marked a turning point in her career as well – even if her boss, studio chief Harry Cohn – fought Capra every step of the way.

“She’s got no ‘name,’” Cohn insisted.

“But she’s got a great voice, Harry,” Capra replied.

“Great voice, but didja see her face? Half of it’s angel, the other half horse.”

Capra conceded Cohn's point (“Her bad side made her look like a different person”), but worked around the problem, explaining, “Sets had to be constructed so that Jean’s entrances showed only the good side of her face. Otherwise, she’d be forced into cumbersome, unnatural crossings and turns to maneuver her ‘best’ side to the camera.”

Yet there was one issue Capra couldn’t solve for the woman he called his favorite actress: “Never have I seen a performer plagued with such a chronic case of stage jitters,” he wrote in his autobiography, The Name Above the Title. “I’m sure she vomited before and after every scene. Those weren’t butterflies in her stomach. They were wasps.”

Still, in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, the end result was pure cinemagic. Coop and Jean’s natural chemistry, in the story of a country bumpkin outwitting city slickers trying to swipe his fortune, became Capra and Riskin's top moneymaker, and earned Capra his second Oscar.

In fact, Mr. Deeds was so successful, Capra planned to do a sequel in which Deeds runs for the U.S. Senate. Jean Arthur was ready to throw her hat into the ring, but Coop was unavailable. So Capra hired another newcomer, and changed the trajectory of that actor’s career as well...which is how James Stewart got the role of a lifetime in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.