Part IV of Corn: Make Way for Odd Little Ducklings

A Queer Approach to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1934)

Poster for Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1934) via Wikipedia

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1934) – Queer

Welcome back, my Capra-Corn Cobs! I hope you are feeling rejuvenated and all buttered up with hopeful news and inspiration to be good to your neighbors in a most Capracorn fashion.

After Misters Booker, Smith, and Doe, I thought we’d do some good (Mr.) Deeds and have a look at the 1934 Capra classic Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. The Review Roulette wheel landed on Queer for our approach this week, so let’s get into the power of non-normative thinking.

As a reminder, queer as a theoretical approach can be interpreted with an LGBTQ+ lens as in my review of camp aesthetics in Damn Yankees (1958), or it can be used to think about non-normative situations or lives in films: the Island of Misfit Toys in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964), the questionable relationship in When Harry Met Sally (1989), and (one of my favorite reviews I’ve written) the exquisite friendship within a romantic partnership in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). With Mr. Deeds, I want to focus on the common uniqueness of the titular man’s individuality.

Let’s start with a universal truth: literally everything in our social structure is made up by us. And that means it doesn’t have to be what it is. We can change it at any point, just as the Republicans are doing now with their AI-generated evil remix of all the worst crimes Americans ever committed against other humans set to a playlist of severely misunderstood cultural hits in distorted tones like a strung-out kid’s party clown in an abandoned house moaning “Born in the USA” into a fun-house mirror. It doesn’t have to be that though. We could have universal healthcare and get that clown some help, and Frank Capra knew that. Capra’s Mr. Deeds would have helped that clown because he had a vision of an America where people with means helped people without.

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town is a film about an odd little duckling, Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper), from a small duckling town, Mandrake Falls, Vermont. Longfellow, as his name would suggest, is a New England poet of modest means who writes couplets for greeting cards and organizes fundraisers for town resources like new fire trucks for the station. He’s a bit gruffer than the Adam Sandler counterpart in the 2002 remake Mr. Deeds, more traditionally masculine and ruggedly independent while also caring for his neighbors and playing the tube in the town’s band – another classic Capra male lead. In the midst of the Great Depression, Deeds’s uncle dies in a car accident and bequeaths him $20 million (roughly $490 some million in 2025). Our odd little duck, however, does not want the money, and when he is goaded into traveling to New York and tricked into a lavish night out, he is forced back to reality harshly by a homeless farmer pointing out the vast disparity between him and Deeds. To make amends, Deeds purchases 2000 10-acre farms and begins to disperse them to farmers who lost everything in the economic crisis. His charity is met with derision and allegations of insanity for even considering giving away his fortune that bring him to a Miracle on 34^th Street (1947)-esque trial scene at the film’s pinnacle.

So, we can see these parallels, right? The people who should be institutionalized for their insanely evil abuses of laws and resources and who have more money than God but still can’t keep a casino open are the ones claiming other people, who wanted to give you healthcare and childcare and a bunch of other types of care that your tax dollars ALREADY PAY FOR, are crazy. They’re framing basic common decency as grounds for imprisonment because you dared to disagree with their rampant human rights violations and Russian roulette style economic system in which the bullet only ever seems to fire on the working class while the billionaire’s empty barrel rolls over faster than Trump when Putin dangles a treat.

But I don’t want to cheapen this review by talking about The Horrors™. I want to talk about the absolute beauty of a stranger we’ll call Babs (not her real name, but a good one nonetheless).

Yesterday, I took my driver’s test (I never had a license because I lived in European cities for almost my whole adult life and didn’t need one until I moved back to the US). Our car was rejected because of the braking mechanism needed for the test and the RMV suggested we try to rent a car from a driving school, one with a brake on the passenger’s side in case I endangered all our lives during the test. So, my husband and I go to this driving school nearby, stressed as hell that I’ll miss my appointment, and the place is closed, and I’m upset, and we’re like “fuck this”, until I hear behind me a woman ask, “can I help you?” My husband and I speak over each other trying to explain the situation and she listens intently and then goes, “give me two minutes.” She goes inside and grabs some paperwork and then returns and introduces herself as Babs, the owner, and says this is highly unusual but she can take me for the test, sponsor me, and give us a 55% discount on what she would usually charge for an hour’s lesson plus test package.

And then she hands me the keys to her car and says, “you get familiar with the car on our way over” and just gets into the car with a complete and total stranger she met four seconds ago on the street. And she gives me pointers for the test and a pep talk and walks me through exactly what will happen and says, “don’t worry, you’ve got this”.

Girl.

Babs didn’t have to do that. She could’ve said, “not my problem, have a blessed day”, but she didn’t. She went above and beyond because she had the means to do so. She had work to do, that’s why she came into work early and saw us distraught at her door, and she blew it off to hand her keys to a complete stranger to take their driving test and didn’t even ask for the money until after the test.

Babs was unbelievably kind to me, and that’s what’s wrong with society: that helping a stranger when you have the means to do so is seen as unbelievable. Mr. Deeds faces a hearing because he had the unconscionable idea of spending money on people who had none by no fault of their own. His kindness was seen as so non-normative that he deserved to be institutionalized, not even just unburdened of his money, institutionalized.

This kind of queer thinking is the kind of thinking that can change society for the better. We can imagine a better world in which we truly care for one another, and some of us do with innovative ideas and plans for walkable cities and basic income and healthcare and all sorts of things that don’t even have common words yet to describe them because they’re so uniquely new. We don’t have to accept status quo, especially not one that sees basic human decency as unnatural and wrong. It is radical how generous Mr. Deeds wanted to be, and it scared the fuck out of the bankers and lawyers who wanted to keep that money out of the hands of the unemployed, homeless farmers just looking for a chance in the quote un-quote land of opportunity.

But you don’t need the equivalent of $490 million to scare the fuck out of our oligarchs today; you only need the spirits of Mr. Deeds and my darling Babs. You need to give a shit about other people, and you need to find ways of expressing that given shit.

Recently, people giving a shit and being very, very loud and public about it have forced the Rose Art crayon-eaters running our country to turn back on some of their worst proposals:

- Harvard stood against the administration’s attacks which were then claimed to be “a mistake”

- Public backlash forced the HHS to rescind RFK Jr.’s proposed “registry” of people with autism

- Constituents’ constant pressure on their representatives encouraged Senator Booker’s marathon speech, Senator Van Hollen’s visit with Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador, and Senator Markey’s visit with Rümeysa Öztürk in Louisiana with Rep. McGovern and Rep. Pressley

- Protesters with TeslaTakedown have spearheaded a movement that has returned a 71% decline year on year for Tesla in Q1

- Public outrage and empowered federal judges forced the administration to reinstate some foreign students’ legal status

This is only some of the good that is happening from regular people taking on that Mr. Deeds spirit, standing for what is right no matter how much is stacked against them. Individuals, who are themselves unique, in community with other unique individuals who share a common idea of how to respect that uniqueness is the foundation of a society that makes people like Trump quiver in their all-white knock-off boat shoes because all they know how to do is look backward, in fear of a future in which their uninteresting, run-of-the-mill, one-note despicable character is recognized as the relic of an exclusionary past that it is, sitting with its compatriots, the removed stone Confederates who gather dust in museum storerooms across the country.

We know Capra doesn’t do light-handed messages or nuance when he wants to make a clear point out of the finest crystal, so that trial scene in which a lawyer is trying to make Mr. Deeds seem insane is a highly choreographed assault on common decency and eccentricity as violent insanity. The lawyer wants Deeds to be seen as a loon, when truly he is just a beautifully odd little duckling whose unique self is nothing but a boon for the neighbors and strangers he shares this country with. His unique character and charm are a threat to the people in power who Capra paints as singularly minded, obsessed with only the power that comes from financial greed who cannot imagine another world in which they are not the arbiters of opportunity.

But Capra and Deeds and Babs and all those protesters and judges and senators can. They know that we don’t have to live like this; our society doesn’t have to be determined by status quo; we can, and indeed must, be the arbiters of opportunity and kindness and compassion to take down these uninteresting fucks. So go out and do a good deed within your means, share your resources, and be kind. Be queer in the face of normalized cruelty and criminalized kindness.