When you live in a small town, you cannot be overly
sensitive to the fact that mostly everyone else will recognise you in the
street, and know both your present business and your past history. Similarly, those
of a poetic nature, that drives them to distill experiences and emotions into
verse that will enter the public domain, must have this small town feeling
quite a lot, given that their soul is rendered bare in black and white. Longfellow
Deeds is a poet in a small town in America
in 1936 and, as we might expect, everybody in Mandrake Falls,
where he lives, knows him and his charming idiosyncrasies. His poetry features
on greeting cards, and these sentimental pieces “wring the heart of common America”. It’s
not a fact that’s stated in so many words in the script, but these
characteristics add up to a decent sort whose moral and ethical compass is
guiding him through life on a common course with most of the other unassuming
decent sorts in America –
if not on a parallel, more elevated, one, given his ability to
write down poems that speak to the sentiments of this, as the script would have
it, underrepresented but vast majority of the population.
It’s not giving too much away to say that Longfellow
relocates from peaceful Mandrake Falls to the busy metropolis of New York. This is a place where reside the
country’s middle-men and commentators, that race of beings that such big cities
have apparently spawned, who toil not themselves but who have managed to get
into a position to take a small slice of everyone else’s pie. The “everyone
else” in this particular instance, and central to the story, are the country’s suffering
farmers who, at the time of the movie’s release, were being starved out by the Great
Depression. It seems that Longfellow just might be the man to lead these dispossessed
out of the wilderness and towards a new era of cultivation. His achilles heel, that might scupper everyone’s good
intentions, is that vulnerable poetic nature of his, smitten as he is with romantic
feelings for a blonde newspaper reporter. Initially as cynical as they make
them in the Big (rotten) Apple, Babe – the reporter who
Longfellow knows by the fake name of Mary Dawson, which is a key to how all the
trouble starts – gradually loses her big-city veneer, under his influence, and starts
to hark back to the idylls of her own small-town childhood. It’s not just Babe
that is won over by Longfellow, he’s fully backed by the common man, but
surely the unscrupulous city-folk will have the last word, and thwart his
grand plans to do the most good for the most people. However, as Longfellow
reminds us, small-towners have done not too bad historically, Ulysses S. Grant being a case in
point, so maybe the city slickers have underestimated him, Babe, and the rest of the decent sorts.
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