[Jean] Arthur admitted that she had such little confidence in herself that though she watched the rushes, she never saw Mr. Deeds [Goes to Town] in its entirety until she watched it with Capra in 1972 at the USA Film Festival in Dallas, when, as he reported, “She cried and thought it a lovely picture."
“Maybe I thought I wasn’t any good, but I certainly knew that it was a great picture," she told [Joseph McBride]. “The crew felt the same way. We were all just walking on air. On Mr. Capra’s set you always thought, ‘Something wonderful is going to happen.’ When I was crying and working so hard at the end in the courtroom in Mr. Deeds, well, it’s funny, but I forgot about it being a picture. I mean completely. Now I look up at the screen and my face starts to do the same things. I feel the feeling all over again."
Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success by Joseph McBride