Reception
The film was generally treated as likable fare by critics and audiences alike. Noted reviewer Graham Greene was effusive that this was Capra's finest film to date, describing Capra's treatment as "a kinship with his audience, a sense of common life, a morality..." Variety noted "a sometimes too thin structure the players and director Frank Capra have contrived to convert (...) into fairly sturdy substance."
This was the first Capra film to be released separately to exhibitors and not "bundled" with other Columbia features. On paper, it was his biggest hit, easily surpassing It Happened One Night.
American Film Institute recognition
- 2000: AFI's 100 Years... 100 Laughs #70
- 2006: AFI's 100 Years... 100 Cheers #83
Read more about this topic: Mr. Deeds Goes To Town
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)