Mr. Deeds Goes To Town - 1936

Originally Frank Capra was going to make Lost Horizon (1937) after Broadway Bill (1934) but Ronald Colman couldn't get out of his other filming commitments. So Capra decided to make this film instead.

From the start, Frank Capra was convinced that Gary Cooper would be perfect for the part of Longfellow Deeds. Production had to wait six months for Cooper to become available, incurring costs of $100,000 for the delay in filming.

Carole Lombard was originally down to play the female lead but she backed out three days before production began to go work on My Man Godfrey (1936). Shooting had to begin without a female lead in place.

Columbia head Harry Cohn was set against Jean Arthur being cast as the female lead. Frank Capra was finally able to persuade him by insisting that Cohn listen to her voice not study her face.

The film cost over $800,000 which was a very high figure for 1936.

Screenwriter Robert Riskin considered this to be his favorite film.

Jean Arthur never saw the film until she and Frank Capra were guests at a 1972 film festival.

Harry Cohn had a dictum in that he would only allow his directors to print any one of their takes, thereby saving the studio a great deal of money. Frank Capra found a loophole in getting round this. At the end of each take, instead of shouting "Cut" he would shout "Do it again", and the actors would launch immediately into an unbroken repetition of the scene.

First film for which Harry Cohn authorized Frank Capra to have his name above the title.
According to a Motion Picture Herald news item, the film was banned in Germany "on the ground that non-Aryan actors had participated" in the production.

Columbia and Frank Capra intended to make a sequel to this movie, starring Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur, entitled "Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington" , based on the story "The Gentleman from Wyoming" (alternately called "The Gentleman from Montana" by both contemporary and modern sources) by Lewis Foster. This story was instead turned into the 1939 film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), directed by Frank Capra and starring Arthur and James Stewart.

The tender scene in which Babe (Jean Arthur) recites a poem that Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper) wrote for her was almost deleted because Frank Capra thought it was too sappy. Jean Arthur had been working very hard on that scene and convinced Capra to at least film it, which he did. The bit of Deeds tripping over the garbage cans was added to provide comic relief to break the sentimental mood.

In the movie, Mr. Deeds couldn't find a word to rhyme with "Budington". This is the writer's middle name (Writers: Clarence Budington Kelland (story)).

The scene in which Deeds meets several famous writers and columnists at a New York restaurant, and finds them to be witty but also sarcastic and rude, is a reference to the Algonquin Round Table, with the character Bill Morrow being loosely based on Alexander Woollcott.

This movie marks the entry of the verb doodle (in the sense of absent-minded scribbling) into the English language. The word was coined for the movie by screenwriter Robert Riskin.

Russell Hicks is in studio records/casting call lists for the role of 'Dr. Malcolm,' but he did not appear or was not identifiable in this movie.

Cast of Mr. Deeds Goes To Town

Gary Cooper Longfellow Deeds/Cinderella Man
Jean Arthur Louise "Babe" Bennett/Mary Dawson
George Bancroft MacWade aka "Mac"
Lionel Stander Cornelius Cobb
Douglass Dumbrille John Cedar
Raymond Walburn Walter
H.B. Warner Judge May
Ruth Donnelly Mabel Dawson
Walter Catlett Morrow