Hook
The Paper He Would Not Sign
There’s a particular kind of silence that follows a signature — the moment right after someone trusts you enough to sign, before they know if that trust was earned.
Longfellow Deeds spends most of Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town withholding exactly that signature. A power of attorney is among the plainest instruments in law: one signature, and another person may act in your name. The page weighs almost nothing in the hand and a great deal in the world.
Deeds is a tuba-playing greeting-card poet from Mandrake Falls, Vermont, who has just inherited twenty million dollars from an uncle he barely knew, and the family lawyer, John Cedar, wants that single page from him. What Cedar does not want Deeds to discover is why: his firm has quietly embezzled half a million dollars from the estate (American Film Institute Catalog).1
When Deeds proposes to give the fortune to ruined farmers, that quiet refusal hardens into a courtroom, where a judge is asked whether a man who would do such a thing can be sane. The film reached theaters in April 1936, in a country still counting its jobless.
In the previous installment, we examined a showman who kept asking for higher steps. The two films shared the same Academy evening, one taking Best Picture and the other winning Capra the directing prize (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 1937).2 The first essay asked what a man keeps. This one asks what a man is permitted to give.
Historical Case
The Man Who Asked to See the Books
Capra built the film from a magazine serial. Clarence Budington Kelland’s “Opera Hat” ran in The American Magazine from April to September 1935, and the screenwriter Robert Riskin pared away most of its opera-house business to keep what mattered: what an honest small-town man does when he is handed more money than his town has ever seen (American Film Institute Catalog; Turner Classic Movies).1,3
New York meets Deeds with open hands and closed ledgers. A reporter, Babe Bennett (Jean Arthur), poses as a penniless girl, befriends him, and writes mocking columns that christen him the Cinderella Man. When the press agent Cornelius Cobb reveals her identity, Deeds is crushed and ready to go home.
Then a starving farmer bursts into his house and accuses him of wasting his money on society’s amusements. We told the story of another farmer whose complaint had nowhere to go in The Farmer’s Videotape.
Deeds takes the charge seriously. He draws up a plan to settle needy families on farms, eighteen million dollars’ worth. Cedar and Deeds’s cousins, the Semples, answer by having him brought before a judge on a charge of insanity (American Film Institute Catalog).1
I keep returning to one detail that never makes it into the summaries. Early in the film, Cedar assures his partners that the firm’s books will never leave their office; a few scenes later, Deeds casually asks to have a look at them (Dirks).4 The hearing is where that small exchange pays out. Cedar’s language counts and Deeds’s rhymes, and the man who asked for an accounting is the one put on trial, while the men who kept the ledgers are the ones with standing to call him unfit.
The case against him is a catalog of oddities the newspapers had already compiled: the tuba, the greeting-card rhymes, a night spent feeding doughnuts to a horse. For most of the hearing Deeds says nothing, listening while strangers read his tenderness back to him as symptoms, and at one point the judge concludes he must be committed (American Film Institute Catalog).1
Critics’ groups sided with the film. The New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review each named it the year’s best picture, and the Academy gave it five nominations. Capra won the directing Oscar, the second of his three.1,2
Biblical Lens
Three Moments in One Chapter of Luke
The sixteenth chapter of Luke opens with an audit.
Luke 16:1–2 · paraphrase
A rich man hears that his manager has been wasting his property. He summons him and demands an account of the books, because the manager cannot go on in the position.
Facing dismissal, the manager calls his master’s debtors one at a time and has each of them sit down and rewrite the bill, a hundred measures of oil quietly becoming fifty (Luke 16:5–7, paraphrased). The master commends him for his shrewdness, not his honesty, and readers have argued over that commendation ever since.
One long-standing proposal holds that the manager was striking his own commission from the bills rather than his master’s money; another sees plain fraud, one more way of protecting himself before the books were opened. Commentators have not settled it (Green, 1997).5 I read the chapter’s three scenes together here as one way of asking a single question, though interpreters do not all agree that they belong to one argument.
Jesus then tells his listeners to make friends for themselves with what older English Bibles call the mammon of unrighteousness (Luke 16:9, paraphrased). The phrase is deliberately uncomfortable. Money here is not holy, and it is not exactly damned. It is slippery, and it is on loan.
Luke 16:10–12 · paraphrase
Whoever can be trusted with little can be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest in little will be dishonest in much. If you have not proved trustworthy with slippery wealth, who will hand you the true riches? And if you have not been trustworthy with what belongs to someone else, who will give you what is your own?
The chapter keeps unsettling the assumption that having something settles the question of responsibility for it. The phrase what belongs to someone else is where it presses hardest.
Luke 16:19–21 · paraphrase
There was a rich man who dressed in purple and fine linen and feasted in splendor every day. At his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his wounds.
The telling never mentions an act of cruelty. It mentions a gate, and a man lying beside it.
Nothing in Luke 16 invites us to read every hardship as a verdict on the person enduring it. The chapter asks something less comfortable: that what a society holds in trust, and how it treats whoever waits at its gate, will in time show which master it has actually been serving.
Capra’s comedy and Luke’s chapter do not tell the same story, and the gap is useful. Luke’s manager is dishonest and is commended for his cleverness; Capra’s lawyer is dishonest and is exposed. What they share is the moment of audit, when someone who holds another person’s books is told to account for them. The film adds a twist the parable does not: Cedar, who is only a trustee, acts like an owner, while Deeds, who is the owner, acts like a steward.
Pattern Insight
Who Gets to Call It Waste
For 1936, the standard historical series puts American unemployment at 16.9 percent. Michael Darby’s revision, which counts people on federal work relief as employed and remains debated among economists, lowers the figure to roughly ten percent (Margo, 1993).6 In the film’s own arithmetic, Deeds commits eighteen of his twenty million dollars to the farm plan, nine-tenths of the estate (American Film Institute Catalog).1
A 1936 audience would have heard an echo in that plan. Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth clubs had promised a national redistribution of fortunes until Long was assassinated in September 1935, barely three months before the cameras began to turn (Brinkley, 1982).7
Those facts explain why a story about giving a fortune away could be told as a comedy in 1936. They do not explain why its hearing still unsettles.
The charge of waste appears twice in the film, and it means two different things. The first comes from a starving farmer, who accuses Deeds of squandering his money, and Deeds receives it as a true audit and changes course. The second comes from men whose ledgers would not survive a reading, and it works as a shield: unable to answer a generous act with an argument, they answer it with a diagnosis.
Luke 16 opens with the same accusation and never tells us whether it was true; it shows only what the accused does when the audit arrives. An accusation of waste can be an audit or a shield, and the difference is whether the accuser is willing to be examined too.
The manager in the parable lowers other people’s debts to buy himself a welcome. Nehemiah, in the story we followed in The Debt Nehemiah Would Not Let Stand, demanded that a city release what it was owed for the sake of the debtors. The arithmetic is the same; the beneficiary is reversed.
Where the film and the Gospel part company is the man at the gate. In both stories a fortune is also a fence, and the gate is where it meets a neighbor. In Luke, the gate stays closed. In Capra, a starving man bursts through it, and the rich man, instead of calling for help to remove him, listens.
Capra’s solution is a fairy tale, and its comfort for a Depression audience was real all the same (Dirks).4 The film spends little time on how eighteen million dollars of farms would actually work, because it trusts the gesture. Luke is warier of gestures. Even the commended manager is followed by a sober word about faithfulness over time.
Closing
What Trust Costs After the Signature
Luke’s chapter ends without a courtroom. After the rich man dies, Abraham tells him that a great chasm has been fixed between the table and the gate, and that his brothers already have Moses and the prophets to listen to (Luke 16:26–31, paraphrased). No judge arrives to dismiss the charge. The parable ends after the gate has closed; the comedy gets to end while it is still open.
Capra lets Deeds finally take the stand. He turns the court’s attention to the oddities of the judge and the psychiatrist, explains that the money belongs with those who need it most, and the judge dismisses the charges while the crowd sweeps him out (American Film Institute Catalog).1
Return to the silence after a signature. The film is one long silence after a dead man’s signature: a will that named a stranger from Vermont and left him to prove, over two hours, whether that trust was earned. It is earned in the unwitnessed stretch afterward, when the one who signed can no longer see what becomes of what he handed over.
Whatever we hold arrived by someone else’s signature, and the silence that followed it is still running.
- American Film Institute, AFI Catalog of Feature Films, entry for Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), catalog.afi.com.
- Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, “The 9th Academy Awards | 1937,” Oscars.org. The top prize, then officially named Outstanding Production, went to The Great Ziegfeld.
- Turner Classic Movies, “The Big Idea Behind Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” tcm.com.
- Tim Dirks, “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936),” Filmsite.org.
- Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997).
- Robert A. Margo, “Employment and Unemployment in the 1930s,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 7, no. 2 (1993): 41–59, which presents both Stanley Lebergott’s (1964) and Michael Darby’s (1976) series. Michael R. Darby, “Three-and-a-Half Million U.S. Employees Have Been Mislaid: Or, an Explanation of Unemployment, 1934–1941,” Journal of Political Economy 84, no. 1 (1976): 1–16. For a critique, see Jonathan Kesselman and N. Eugene Savin, “Three-and-a-Half Million Workers Never Were Lost,” Economic Inquiry 16, no. 2 (1978): 205–225.
- Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Knopf, 1982).
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