Mr. Deeds

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Although I have never seen an Adam Sandler movie, his remake of Frank
Capra's "Mr. Deeds" (which will also go unwatched) deserves some comment.

Sandler is as much a phenomenon of the time we are passing through as Jerry
Lewis was of the 1950s and early 1960s. Just like Lewis, Sandler bases all
his movies on a recognizable type. In his case, it is a "Joe Six-Pack" sort
of guy who always finds a way to defeat his upper-class adversaries. "Happy
Chandler" was a typical Sandler flick (even using a similar name to his
own). It depicted a crude hockey player who storms his way into the
professional golf circuit while showing up all the snobs who try to exclude
him and his unconventional style--he swats at the golf ball as if it were a
hockey puck. Yes, I actually confess to having seen five minutes of this
awful film.

In some ways, it was inevitable that Sandler remake a Capra film, since
this was his vision as well. During the 1930s and 40s, Capra made film
after film depicting the little guy overcoming the forces of adversary,
especially the rich who were taking advantage of working stiffs. His best
known film is "It's a Wonderful Life", which is shown ad infinitum/ad
nauseum around the Thanksgiving-Christmas holidays. Jimmy Stewart plays a
small town banker who puts everything on the line to prevent a rival
capitalist from foreclosing on his depositors' homes. These types of films
eventually gave birth to the word "Capraesque", which means something like
rooting for the underdog.

Since I have never seen the original "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town", I have to
rely on this capsule review on epinions.com:

>>"Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" was directed by the legendary Frank Capra. It
was the first of several successful films of his featuring a common man who
makes good, at the expense of corrupt, greedy and powerful men. Later films
on this same theme would be "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington", "You Can't Take
it With You", and "It's a Wonderful Life".

Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper) lives peacefully in the podunk community of
Mandrake Falls, where he makes his living writing poems for greeting cards.
He is visited by strangers from the big city, who tell him that he has
inherited a twenty million dollar estate. Deeds is taken to live in his New
York City mansion, with blunt spoken, frog voiced Cobb (Lionel Stander)
serving as his secretary. 

A team of crooked lawyers, led by John Cedar (Douglas Dumbrille) is out to
fleece the naive Deeds, but Deeds proves more wary than expected. However,
he falls promptly for reporter Babe Bennett (Jean Arthur), who pretends to
be a 'lady in distress' in order to get a story. Deeds' late-night
foolishness, encouraged by Bennett, makes him the city's laughing stock.
Bennett's scandal-sheet editor is played by George Bancroft. 

Deeds finally has had enough of the ridicule, and is determined to give
away his fortune to farmers ruined by the Depression. With Cedar's windfall
in jeopardy, he tries to put Deeds into a mental asylum. A dramatic court
battle follows, with H.B. Warner playing the judge.<<

(http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-1E09-D990DCA-38792D75-prod1)

While most of the reviews of Sandler's remake have focused on the crappy
script and the awful performances, including that of his love interest
Winona Ryder, who apparently has about as much flair for comedy as I do for
break dancing, there is a bizarre twist on the "Capraesque" question
according to Chicago film critic Roger Ebert, who trashed the film.
(http://www.suntimes.com/output/ebert1/wkp-news-deeds28f.html). He writes:

>>Turns out Deeds is the distant relative of an elderly zillionaire who
freezes to death in the very act of conquering Everest. Control of his
media empire and a $40 billion fortune goes to Deeds, who is obviously too
good-hearted and simple-minded to deserve it, so a corporate executive
named Cedar (Peter Gallagher) conspires to push him aside?

The moral center of the story is curious. The media empire, we learn,
controls enormous resources and employs 50,000 people. The evil Cedar wants
to break it up. The good-hearted Deeds fights to keep it together so those
50,000 people won't be out of work. This is essentially a movie that wants
to win our hearts with a populist hero who risks his entire fortune in
order to ensure the survival of Time-AOL-Warner-Disney-Murdoch. What would
Frank Capra have thought about the little guy bravely standing up for the
monolith?<<

Indeed, it should not come as any surprise that Sandler turns Capra
upside-down, for despite all his genuflection toward the common man, there
is evidence that he shares the kind of hatred toward ordinary people that
was the stock-and-trade of Saturday Night Live in the 1980s, from whence he
comes. As opposed to the subversive message of the original SNL, by the mid
1990s the show featured cruel and unfunny skits about office workers,
messengers, black people, etc. This is where Sandler comes from.

Of course, despite Roger Ebert, Capra was not much better. Joseph McBride's
biography of Capra titled "The Catastrophe of Success" reveals a
sensibility even more odious than Sandler's. From a May 3, 1992 NY Times
book review, we learn:

>>Audiences flocked to see "Capraesque" movies like "Mr. Deeds Goes to
Town," "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" and "Meet John Doe" -- parables of
ordinary people forced to stand up against the greed and corruption of the
rich and powerful. Those dramatic comedies, with their depictions of
hardship, their "common man" heroes (usually Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper)
and their celebrations of small-town virtues, gave expression to a country
struggling to climb out of the Depression; they have, ever since their
release, been identified with Roosevelt and the New Deal. Yet it is one of
the great surprises of Joseph McBride's masterly, comprehensive and
frequently surprising biography, "Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success,"
that the man who seemed to put the spirit of the New Deal on the screen
was, in reality, a closet reactionary and a dogged Roosevelt hater. 

Frank Capra managed to fool just about everyone; even his wife was unsure
of his political affiliations. Longtime co-workers who were Democrats
assumed he shared their political convictions. Katharine Hepburn, who
starred in his 1948 picture "State of the Union," thought him "quite
liberal"; others applied the term "radical" to him. And why shouldn't they
have, when Variety was calling a sympathetic character in "Mr. Deeds Goes
to Town" "quasi-communistic" and The Saturday Evening Post was reporting
that in the Soviet Union Capra was "hailed as a comrade"? But as Mr.
McBride, the author of previous books on Howard Hawks, John Ford and Orson
Welles, tells us, Capra was a lifelong Republican who never once voted for
Roosevelt. He was an admirer of Franco and Mussolini. In later years,
during the McCarthy period, he served as a secret F.B.I. informer.<<


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org



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