The New Pictures

Mr, Deeds Goes to Town (Columbia). Columbia's star team of Writer Robert Riskin and Director Frank Capra are co-masters of a unique kind of U. S. comedy, part farce, part fantasy and part pure hokum, which has been often imitated but never successfully copied since they brought it to the screen in It Happened One Night. This time, in Clarence Budington Kelland's ingenious story about the misfortunes of a humble young man who inherits $20,000,000, they have a perfect show case for their specialty.

When a slick Manhattan lawyer arrives in Mandrake Falls, Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper), the village poet, receives his good news without removing from his lips the tuba which he plays in stress or inspiration. This is a characteristic reaction. It provides the key to his later behavior when, installed in his uncle's Manhattan mansion and bored by the task of humbling smart alecks who mistake his lack of polish for absence of wit, he finds recreation in feeding doughnuts to cab horses, chasing fire engines and sliding down the marble banisters.

It is the essence of Riskin-Capra magic to defy analysis on paper because it fits so perfectly its proper medium, the screen. In Mr. Deeds Goes to Town it is applied most spectacularly to a courtroom scene in which Longfellow simultaneously proves his sanity and regains the faith in the girl he loves (Jean Arthur) which he had lost on learning that she was the reporter who made him the city's laughing stock. The scene is consequently the funniest as well as one of the most spiritually nourishing cinema climaxes of the current season.

That, with wise direction, he can achieve something beyond the manly muteness on which his reputation as an actor has hitherto reposed, Gary Cooper recently proved in the Frank Borzage-Ernst Lubitsch Desire. Herein he gives further evidence of a sense of humor, thereby helps its authors and an expert cast make Mr. Deeds Goes to Town altogether worthwhile entertainment.

Gentle Julia (Twentieth Century-Fox). Busily cornering the market on child talent, Twentieth Century-Fox not only controls Shirley Temple but also her antithesis, Jane Withers. Like Captain January, Gentle Julia is a star's ve-hide, perambulator size. It exhibits Miss Withers as Florence Atwater, small niece of the heroine of Booth Tarkington's famed novel. She spends her time disrupting the flirtations of Julia Atwater (Marsha Hunt), blackmailing her small cousin (Jackie Searle), annoying her grandfather, snubbing her aunt's most impressive beau. She has an attachment for a shaggy young newspaperman (Tom Brown). By the time the picture ends, she has safely married him off to Julia.

In the class with, though not of the quality of Ah Wilderness, Gentle Julia is a pleasing collection of minor small-town episodes, pre-War style, deriving flavor from the acid presence of 10-year-old Miss Withers. Good shot: Florence Atwater eating a banana royal.

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