What's with this guy? He punches out two guys (admittedly they deserved it, but you don't see me whacking George Dubya) and is ready to take on several more. Then when his girlfriend and a lawyer betray him (first time that ever happened), he falls into a deep, passive depression. Nowadays, he WOULD be put under observation.
shareWell, the way I see it, Mary Dawson a.k.a. Louise Bennett was the first woman Longfellow Deeds ever allowed himself to fall in love with. He mistakenly thought she fit the damsel-in-distress that he always wanted. And, in fact, she was. She, like a lot of us even today, had given up on being, let alone finding, someone as honest and caring as Deeds.
But, getting back to the point, Deeds never had to deal with heartbreak before, let alone so much greed and treachery. Notice that once everyone helped him to believe in himself and his values again, he got up and dealt with everything. He just needed a little push to get back up on his horse after he fell off. We all could use a little help like that at sometime in our lives.
As for punching out the writers and the lawyer, well, fighting words are not a protected form of speech under the U.S. constitution according to the Supreme Court. And I think the lawyer went well beyond fighting words with the stunt he tried to pull. I only wish we saw lawyer John Seder go to jail, or at least get sued, for misappropriating $500,000. I will say this, that even though Deeds' punching may be legally permissible, he could still be sued for it, and even if he won, the lawyers' fees would carve a nice piece out of his inheritance, even as large as $20 million was back in 1936. I can't imagine how much that would be in today's dollars. $20 billion?
I see a lot of symbolism in this movie. I view Deeds as our good values, often up against the ropes after several rounds of heartbreak and treachery. Once we get over ourselves, we get back in the fight and we do all right. I say if you don't side with Mr. Deeds, you may need your head examined. . . .
"Mr. Deeds Goes To Town" is yet another great movie by Frank Capra ("It Happened One Night", the similar "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington" and "It's a Wonderful Life"), and if you love these other Capra classics, I'd expect you'd like this one, too.
Well those guys just flat out insulted him infront of a whole bunch of people, and his date. And its not like his going to punch out Babe.
"Get over here and kill me you little pompiss son of a whore" - Grandpa Marsh (south park)
I'm a bit surprised that the psychiatrist gave a very modern description of manic-depression (bipolar). When this movie was made, much of psychiatry was still quite in it's infancy.
Psychiatry was about forty years old by 1936. It may have been in its adolescence, but I think it was past its infancy. I have heard/read psychiatric analyses today that continue to use verbiage from Dr. Freud even though his original theories are mostly no longer accepted. To boil this down a bit, I think that a lot of learned doctors and scientists had been thinking deeply about the psyche for decades by the time this came out. We (yes, I definitely include me) are often surprised by how advanced the thinking was two generations ago, and sometimes by the thinking of many more generations back.
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I thought the same thing--decades ago characters punching people when they were mad was acceptable in movies, and audiences loved it. We have a different viewpoint now and it's not considered funny-in 2015 , we think Deeds looks violent in an unbalanced way, and then decidedly depressed. I would have to agree with the psychiatrist's diagnosis--except that Deeds snaps out of it all too fast, and I know the movie was trying to ridicule psychiatry, as was popularly done in those days.
shareYep, "he falls into a deep, passive depression"... or DOES he? I'm watching the courtroom scene now, and it seems like those silent periods allowed him to observe everyone else and to think things through, building in his mind the evidence he could use to defend himself. We watch him and wonder, "What in the world is wrong with him?", and then, finally... "Ah, so there WAS a method to his 'madness'!" Deeds may or may not have been deliberately tricking everyone around him into thinking he was hopelessly depressed, but apparently Capra did intend to mislead us for awhile.
The courtroom punch-out was a bit much-- his verbal attack on the guy's greed would have been sufficient-- but it must have been an audience-pleaser, especially in 1936. I suspect another post here was on-target about such a thing being seen as more appropriate, at least onscreen, in the 'old days'. In his first memoir, Dick Cavett, who was born in '36, wrote about going to movies in his childhood days: "There were no heroes in the movies who didn't fight. Even the pacifist and the priest, who was played by Ward Bond, would reach the last, backbreaking straw and mutter, 'Forgive me, Father,' while he spat on his hands and laid out the villain."