I'm a big Frank Capra fan and Messrs Deeds, Smith & Doe are all high up in my list of all-time favourite movies, to say nothing of the peerless "It's A Wonderful Life", but watching this old chestnut again, I felt the old "Capra-magic" was less prominent than usual and that the movie had a mustiness about it of, well, a big old house, like the one at the centre of the plot! It's been said before that other superior Capra movies were less well rewarded than this one which unaccountably for me won the "Best Director" & "Best Film" Oscars of its year, this in a vintage year with "The Adventures Of Robin Hood" and "Angels With Dirty Faces" amongst the shouldn't-have-been runners up.
Of course it's not without its charms, with the seniors leading the way in the acting stakes, especially Lionel Barrymore and Edward Arnold, followed by the always watchable James Stewart and Jean Arthur, both, like so many others on view, Capra perennials. Capra demonstrates his gift again for crowd scenes, choreographing his players skilfully, not easy when these include a careering Negro servant, forever pirouetting ballet dancer and old man Barrymore permanently on crutches. And yet I found this satire on greed had too much of the velvet glove about it and some of the serious scenes just too bleak when set in counterpoint to what has gone before. Never mind that Edward Arnold's "Tammany Hall" prototype AP Kirby drives an innocent man to an early death; within minutes he's leading the party in a jamboree by playing a mouth-organ duet with Barrymore to salve his conscience and get us to the predictable happy-ending.
Certain scenes are redolent of other films, for example Stewart and Arthur's goofy dance in the park prompted by a bunch of what look like refugee kids from "Our Town" was reworked better in "It's A Wonderful Life", while the couple's embarrassing entrance and exit at a society dinner pales alongside Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn's hilarious doings in a similar scene in Hawks' "Bringing Up Baby". I've also just watched Preston Sturges' lesser known "Christmas in July" and got more sense of community there than I got here, and it plays a full 50 minutes less! I could also comment yet again on the subservient stereotypical roles doled out to the Negroes in the cast but this was par for the course I appreciate for many Hollywood films of this era.
Enough, already; for me Capra is at his best when there's a dark undertow to his work, as in all four of his other films I mentioned earlier. Here the whimsy comes over as flimsy and no amount of amusing eccentricity on display can displace the feeling that this creaky old theatrical adaptation is now showing its age and doesn't belong in the vanguard of this great director's work.
Of course it's not without its charms, with the seniors leading the way in the acting stakes, especially Lionel Barrymore and Edward Arnold, followed by the always watchable James Stewart and Jean Arthur, both, like so many others on view, Capra perennials. Capra demonstrates his gift again for crowd scenes, choreographing his players skilfully, not easy when these include a careering Negro servant, forever pirouetting ballet dancer and old man Barrymore permanently on crutches. And yet I found this satire on greed had too much of the velvet glove about it and some of the serious scenes just too bleak when set in counterpoint to what has gone before. Never mind that Edward Arnold's "Tammany Hall" prototype AP Kirby drives an innocent man to an early death; within minutes he's leading the party in a jamboree by playing a mouth-organ duet with Barrymore to salve his conscience and get us to the predictable happy-ending.
Certain scenes are redolent of other films, for example Stewart and Arthur's goofy dance in the park prompted by a bunch of what look like refugee kids from "Our Town" was reworked better in "It's A Wonderful Life", while the couple's embarrassing entrance and exit at a society dinner pales alongside Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn's hilarious doings in a similar scene in Hawks' "Bringing Up Baby". I've also just watched Preston Sturges' lesser known "Christmas in July" and got more sense of community there than I got here, and it plays a full 50 minutes less! I could also comment yet again on the subservient stereotypical roles doled out to the Negroes in the cast but this was par for the course I appreciate for many Hollywood films of this era.
Enough, already; for me Capra is at his best when there's a dark undertow to his work, as in all four of his other films I mentioned earlier. Here the whimsy comes over as flimsy and no amount of amusing eccentricity on display can displace the feeling that this creaky old theatrical adaptation is now showing its age and doesn't belong in the vanguard of this great director's work.