“It’s like I’m out in a big boat, and I see one fellow in a rowboat who’s tired of rowing and wants a free ride, and another fellow who’s drowning. Who would you expect me to rescue? Mr. Cedar – who’s just tired of rowing and wants a free ride? Or those men out there who are drowning? Any ten-year-old child will give you the answer to that.”

Frank Capra made a number of films (of which Mr. Deeds Goes to Town is the first) in which an honest man finds himself in a dishonest world and in which kindness and humanity win out over avarice and greed. It’s more than just Socialism vs Capitalism, although in this film that’s a strong thread. It’s also about common sense and an idealistic struggle (by Capra and his main characters) to maintain a steady perspective on the world when faced with modernism and modern manipulation. In the later film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington this manipulation was political, in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, it is about whether the desire to help the needy and to share wealth is somehow a sign of insanity.

It’s a brilliantly constructed romantic comedy with a steel core of sentimentality that, in Capra’s hands, doesn’t become saccharine or mawkish. Instead what we’re left with is a sense of the profound and of a clear-eyed dissection of the effects of the Great Depression. The performance by Gary Cooper (playing a character-type that Jimmy Stewart would go on to make his own) is completely believable: mercurial, tempestuous but completely moral. Deeds has that strange and paradoxical combination of unpredictability and steadfastness.

To be sure, this is town vs country, but it’s never been better.

Watch in a double bill with My Man Godfrey (1936), a similar meditation on the Great Depression.