Frank Capra: Meet John Doe

The USPS has issued a set of four stamps honoring great film directors and the films for which they are most remembered. The four selected are: John Ford (The Searchers), John Huston (The Maltese Falcon), Frank Capra (It Happened One Night), and Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot). We will be exploring the lives and work of these directors over the next several weeks. In this post LR Simon discusses Meet John Doe (1941).

Meet John Doe touches on several of Frank Capra’s favorite themes: politics, media, power, money, and society’s ill treatment of the poor. Barbara Stanwyck plays Ann Mitchell, who has been ordered to write one last column for her newspaper before clearing out her desk. She writes a letter from “John Doe” protesting the state of society and threatening to commit suicide on Christmas Eve. After a rival newspaper suspects the fraud and starts investigating, Mitchell is rehired, and she devises a plan with the editor to keep the “John Doe” story alive to push sales.

The paper auditions numerous poor men to be their John Doe. The film reduces the auditions to a montage that uses several techniques adapted from the silent era. The paper settles on John Willoughby (Gary Cooper), a former baseball player, to play Doe, rents him a hotel suite, buys him a new wardrobe, and pays him $50. Willoughby’s friend, the Colonel (Walter Brennan) has severe misgivings about the charade, and complains about the “heelots” – heels whose sole purpose in life is to snooker people out of their money. “Money goes to your head,” he says, “even just $50.”

Mitchell’s columns about John Doe and the speeches she writes for him lead to a nationwide movement and the establishment of “John Doe Clubs.” The newspaper’s publisher, D.B. Norton (Edward Arnold) sees an opportunity in the clubs to establish a ready-made constituency for a run for political office. He tries to co-opt the movement, and when Willoughby tries to speak his own mind, the publisher sets out to ruin Willoughby. Norton successfully stymies Willoughby’s attempts to redeem himself, so he decides to go through with the suicide attempt. Mitchell and members of the John Doe clubs try to dissuade him from the attempt, with Mitchell telling him, “If it’s worth dying for, it’s worth living for.”

Cooper is believable as a former baseball hero, if a bit clean to play a tramp. Stanwyck plays Mitchell with verve and just enough cynicism to make her anger at being fired believable but not so much that her softening toward Willoughby strains credulity. As usual, Capra’s affection for all of the characters is apparent on the screen.

Capra had made many films championing the poor and the downtrodden, and his work made him rich. In Meet John Doe, the audience can sense Capra working through his issues with socioeconomic classes and how money can affect one’s values. If Meet John Doe feels dated, it’s because so much of the story takes place in a newspaper office. Thematically it remains relevant because the socioeconomic issues of the early 1940s are not so different from those of today.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Capra

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_John_Doe