MAJESTIC THEATRE

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 256, 25 July 1936, Page 13

MAJESTIC THEATRE

“Mr. Deeds Goes to Town”

“Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” the Columbia picture which drew big crowds to the Majestic Theatre throughout last week, entered on the second week of its run at that theatre yesterday. Its popularity with Wellington picturegoers has proved that the claim made for it, that it is one of the year’s outstanding comedy-romances, was far from estimating it too highly. Gary Cooper is seen in the title role, as a rusticated young poet who becomes heir to a huge fortune. Ever since “Bengal Lancer,” Gary Cooper has drawn the public. In this film, directed by Frank Capra, he is at his best. Opposite him is Jean Arthur, who has been scaling fame f s ladder with a sure grip in the last year or two. A small-town young man, Cooper, inherits 20,000,000 dollars when his uncle, one Semple, is killed in a car crash. He goes to New York, and the newspapers are on his trail to see how he uses the money. Jean Arthur, a bright young journalist, gets ahead of her paper’s rivals with the news by the process of using her undoubted charm on the innocent Mr. Deeds. The theme is conventional when she begins to have qualms about the way she is getting “copy” by heartlessly toying with a decent young chap. She realises that she loves him; he, of course, is disillusioned. The girl has written up Mr. Deeds's escapades, such as feeding doughnuts to a cab horse, finding his way to his mansion late one night in his singlet and underpants, and so on- A crook lawyer, played excellently by Douglass Dumbrille, schemes to defraud Mr. Deeds, but finds that he is not as green as he looks. The high spot of the story is a sequence in a court of law whither Mr. Deeds has been taken by his enemies who seek to prove him insane because he has allocated 18,000,000 dollars to developing a small-farm scheme for the unemployed. When it appears that his enemies have won the case and will get Mr. Deeds committed to an asylum, he breaks a long silence. That is the denouement which tops off the picture. Supporting players include H. B. Warner, as a Supreme Court judge, George Bancroft as a newspaper editor, and Walter Catlett as Mr. Deeds’s Press agent. A varied supporting programme completes a fine entertainment,