Lady for a Day (Frank Capra, 1933)

Lady for a Day (Frank Capra, 1933)

Cast: May Robson, Warren William, Guy Kibbee, Glenda Farrell, Ned Sparks, Walter Connolly, Jean Parker, Nat Pendleton, Barry Norton, Halliwell Hobbes, Hobart Bosworth, Robert Emmett O'Connor. Screenplay: Robert Riskin, based on a story by Damon Runyon. Cinematography: Joseph Walker. Art direction: Stephen Goosson. Film editing: Gene Havlick. Music: Howard Jackson.

There's almost enough salt in Robert Riskin's screenplay for Lady for a Day -- much of it supplied by the Damon Runyon story on which it's based -- to offset Frank Capra's characteristic indulgence in sweets. Much of the fiber of the movie is provided by such worthy character actors as pickle-faced Ned Sparks, brassy Glenda Farrell, florid Guy Kibbee, and beefy Nat Pendleton, who help us tolerate the saccharine qualities of the tale of mother love. We never find out a lot of the backstory of Apple Annie, the gin-swigging street vendor who must pose as a society dame to fulfill the illusions she has raised in the letters she's written over the years to her daughter, Louise. The girl was raised in a convent in Europe and is now engaged to the son of a Spanish count; she wants to bring her fiancé and prospective father-in-law to New York to meet her mother. Covering up the truth about Annie necessitates a lot of manipulation by the swanky Dave the Dude, one of the denizens of the Runyon underworld. But what is the truth about Annie? Riskin and Capra never tell us who Louise's father was, let alone how Annie managed to send the child abroad and keep her secret all these years. Or, at the end, exactly how Dave the Dude saves the day when all looks lost. But this is for the good: Finessing the backstory turns Lady for a Day into what it has to be in order to be palatable at all: a fairy tale. To my tastes, which usually can't tolerate Capra's sentimental populism, this is one of his best films. Just don't look to it for plausibility.

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra, 1936)

Jean Arthur and Gary Cooper in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town 

Longfellow Deeds: Gary Cooper
Babe Bennett: Jean Arthur
MacWade: George Bancroft
Cornelius Cobb: Lionel Stander
John Cedar: Douglass Dumbrille
Walter: Raymond Walburn
Judge May: H.B. Warner
Mabel Dawson: Ruth Donnelly
Dr. Emile Von Hallor: Gustav von Seyffertitz
Morrow: Walter Catlett
Farmer: John Wray
Mrs. Meredith: Emma Dunn

Director: Frank Capra
Screenplay: Robert Riskin
Based on a story by Clarence Budington Kelland
Cinematography: Joseph Walker
Art direction: Stephen Goosson
Film editing: Gene Havlick
Music: Howard Jackson

Frank Capra's perennially popular Mr. Deeds Goes to Town currently has an 8.0 score on IMDb and an 89% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. So let me cavil a little bit about its psychological dishonesty, namely the scene in which Deeds, engagingly played by Gary Cooper, is subjected to a sanity hearing because of his attempt to give away to distressed farmers the $20 million he has inherited -- a scheme that economically speaking doesn't bear much close scrutiny. Capra (and Robert Riskin, who as writer must bear his share of blame) brings on an "expert," a caricature Viennese psychiatrist, who explains that Deeds suffers from "manic depression," the now-discarded term for bipolar disorder, and exhibits a peaks-and-valleys chart of Deeds's mood swings. It's pretty clear that Capra and Riskin want us to regard this testimony as quackery. But anyone who has dealt with bipolarity, either first-hand or with family or friends, can see the element of truth in the diagnosis. We don't know enough about Deeds's daily life in Mandrake Falls, Vt., where, as the Faulkner sisters testify, everyone is "pixilated" but them, to give a confident diagnosis that Deeds is in fact bipolar, and the attempt to use the diagnosis as a smear is reprehensible. But Deeds's decision to refuse legal council at the hearing is the act of someone who really is depressed, and while we are supposed to dismiss as chicanery the attempt to classify his eccentricities -- playing the tuba, sliding down banisters, chasing firetrucks, feeding doughnuts to a horse, and above all wanting to give away his money -- as manic behavior, there's a grain of truth there. Moreover, Deeds does in fact exhibit violent tendencies: witness his punching out the poets who mock his greeting-card verses -- who beats up poets? -- and his assaulting the lawyers at the trial. Capra intends his film as a valorization of small-town virtues against city cynicism, but even that doesn't bear much close scrutiny, especially in the age of more critical looks at small town life as Sinclair Lewis's Main Street or Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. It has always struck me that Capra was the most empty-headed of the great American directors, making films that annihilate thought, or at least anesthetize it. I like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town more than most Capra films: At its best it's lively and funny, but its worst is pretty annoying and even pernicious stuff.