Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

Huh. I liked it a LOT better when it was called Meet John Doe. And when Jean Arthur was Barbara Stanwyck. Gary Cooper was as charming as ever, but there's something off about that Longfellow Deeds character. Preposterous is the word, I think.

I'm learning that Capra is quite the hit or miss. Meet John Doe was off the chain, as they say on the east coast; You Can't Take It With You was a huge stinker; It's a Wonderful Life was quite good, and so was Mr. Smith Goes to Washington except for its stinky, implausible, deus-ex-machina ending.

File Mr. Deeds in the stinky drawer as well. Either small-town America in the 1940s was a wacky, absurdist place beyond understanding, or else Frank Capra made a movie about small town America without ever having set foot in America. In fact, based on this movie, you'd imagine that Capra isn't even from this planet.