Mr. Deeds Goes to Town is a 1936 comedy film directed by Frank Capra, based on the story Opera Hat by Clarence Budington Kelland that appeared in serial form in the Saturday Evening Post.Poague 1975, p. 17. It stars Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur in her first featured role. The screenplay was written by Kelland and Robert Riskin in his fifth collaboration with Capra. McBride 1992, p. 332.

Plot

In the middle of the Great Depression, Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper), co-owner of a tallow works, part-time greeting card poet and tuba-playing inhabitant of the hamlet of Mandrake Falls, Vermont, inherits the enormous fortune of 20 million dollars from his late uncle, Martin Semple. His uncle's scheming attorney, John Cedar (Douglass Dumbrille), locates Deeds and takes him to New York City.

Cedar gives his cynical troubleshooter, ex-newspaperman Cornelius Cobb (Lionel Stander), the task of keeping reporters away from the heir. He is outfoxed, however, by star reporter Louise "Babe" Bennett (Jean Arthur), who appeals to Deeds' romantic fantasy of rescuing a damsel in distress by masquerading as a poor worker named Mary Dawson. She pretends to faint from exhaustion after "walking all day to find a job" and worms her way into his confidence. She proceeds to write a series of enormously popular articles mocking Longfellow's hick ways and odd behavior, naming him the "Cinderella Man". Meanwhile, Cedar tries to get Deeds' power of attorney in order to keep his financial misdeeds secret.