Meet John Doe (1941)
To save her job, a columnist invents a letter from a jobless "John Doe" who vows to jump off City Hall on Christmas Eve in protest at a heartless society. The paper hires a drifting ex-ballplayer to pose as the author; his plain-spoken broadcasts spark a nationwide movement of neighborly John Doe clubs, which the publisher then moves to bend toward his own political ends.
Frank Capra and writer Robert Riskin shot several different endings for Meet John Doe and still felt unsatisfied, a measure of how uneasily its portrait of media manipulation and demagoguery sat beside the studio’s need for uplift. The copyright was not renewed, and the film lapsed into the public domain in 1969.
Background
Frank Capra made Meet John Doe through his own company, with a script by Robert Riskin based on a story by Richard Connell. Gary Cooper plays the drifter who becomes the face of a made-up movement, Barbara Stanwyck the columnist behind the hoax, and Edward Arnold the publisher who wants to use it for his own purposes. Walter Brennan steals scenes as the Colonel, a fellow drifter who sees through everything.
What to watch for
Capra’s earlier films had celebrated ordinary people; this one is more doubtful, and it asks how easily a crowd can be manipulated. The ending was reworked several times, and even after the final version was chosen critics found it strained. That uncertainty is part of what makes the film interesting. Watch the scene in which Cooper delivers a radio speech written by someone else, and the moment when he realises what he has become part of. It is one of the more challenging films of Capra’s career.
