MEET JOHN DOE

This 1941 Frank Capra film takes some big swings which don't totally work, but it's a fascinating piece of 'Capra-Corn' which tackles some big ideas.  

The great Barbara Stanwyck plays a resourceful newspaper columnist, Anne, who invents a fictitious man, whom she names John Doe, who is so angry at the state of the world that he threatens to kill himself on Christmas Eve, some months hence.  

John Doe so captures people's interest that Stanwyck comes up with the bright idea, as a stunt to increase the newspaper's circulation, of taking someone off the street to pretend to be him. The guy she chooses, Gary Cooper, is a homeless man who used to be a baseball player before he injured his elbow.

He's a simple fellow who is happy enough to be pampered by the newspaper.   He's sufficiently taken with Stanwyck that he turns down an opportunity to make money by exposing the stunt, and instead delivers on radio a rousing speech she has written, extolling the virtues of neighbourliness.

Things start to take a darker turn when Mr Norton, the shadowy millionaire who owns the paper, bankrolls a national network of John Doe clubs.   Anne and John learn late in the day that he is planning to use these clubs as a launchpad of a new political party with him as a presidential candidate.

This leads to a dramatic climax and a happy ending of sorts.  Norton's plan is scuppered when John refuses to go along with it, and when he is on the point of actually killing himself he is persuaded not to because although he was a fake, the ideas he was promoting are not.

A main theme explored here is the manipulation of the masses, whether for good or for evil, and the role of the media and of the rich in society in this.  This theme had a lot of resonance in 1941 given the rise of fascism but it still remains relevant today.

Towards the end of the film it dawned on me that John was becoming a Christ-like figure in the way his followers turn against him, and that he feels compelled to atone for his deception by killing himself.  This becomes more explicit right at the end of the film when Anne tells him that the ideas that she and John have been promulgating (which might be summarised as love-thy-neighbour) have been around for 2,000 years.

As one of Stanwyck's greatest fans I was disappointed that her character never comes into focus.  Is she a cynic happy to enrich herself or does she believe in the words she is putting into John's mouth?   The film can never make up its mind on this crucial point.

Arguably the film would work much better if her character goes through a clear arc where she starts off cynical and ends up fully on the side of the underdog, and if John is the catalyst for her change.

Unfortunately John is a dull character, and Anne's declaration of love for him in the final scene seems to come out of nowhere. 

Walter Brennan plays a friend of John who is sceptical as to how the change in John's fortunes will work out.  He's an entertaining character with an idiosyncratic turn of phrase, such as when he says the world is being shaved by a drunk barber (no, I don't know what it means either).

But it's typical of the muddled screenplay that his character disappears midway only to make an irrelevant return towards the end.