Capra's Oscar spree

Yes, as Dorothy Gale guessed, Frank Capra's middle win of his 3 Best Director Oscars in 5 years, later remade as an Adam Sandler film, was Mr. Deeds Goes To Town. Capra's was the only win that the film got, but it was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (Gary Cooper), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Robert Riskin).

Mr. Deeds is a small-town guy, a greeting card poet and tuba player in the local band, who inherits a distant relative's $20million fortune. He is dragged away from town to New York City to go through the business of inheriting the money, whereupon he is immediately set upon by the vultures of society. Lawyers seeking power of attorney, "relatives" seeking their share of the fortune, reporters looking for the big scoop, the societal elite looking to humiliate the new-money rube. Deeds is initially ridiculed in the papers as the "Cinderella Man," even as he falls in love with the reporter who, unbeknownst to him, is writing the Cinderella Man articles. When Deeds eventually decides to give the money to those in need, he is brought to trial to prove he is insane and incapable of managing the fortune.

The film hits all of the typical Capra themes: celebration of small-town values over big city living, the idea that friends/people are worth more than money, etc... all of the anti-capitalist, communistic sentiments that make it so hard for me to believe that Capra was actually one of the most politically conservative people that Hollywood ever saw. Cooper is endearing here in the role that typically went to James Stewart in Capra's films, with a strange combination of enjoyable antics and quickness to violence. (Before seeing the film, I wondered what Adam Sandler could have seen in the role to have decided to star in a remake, as so much of his comedy depends on cruelty or violence. With the number of punches that Cooper's Deeds throws, I understand a little better now.) Capra's films always leave me with a bit of a warm, glowy feeling - sentimental without being sappy, old-fashioned without being dated, having a message without being preachy. And yet, they always seem to me to pale in comparison to his real masterpiece, It's A Wonderful Life. They always seem to have the same goal as that film, without quite managing to achieve it so eloquently and absorbingly as that one great film did. Part of me knows that it is unfair to hold that against his other films, but my gut reaction whenever I see any of Capra's other movies is "It's good, but it's not quite It's A Wonderful Life."

Movie trivia question: Another frequent Best Director winner, John Ford won his last of 4 Best Director Oscars (a record still held to this date), for this John Wayne picture.