Meet John Doe (1941)

Meet John Doe is an American romantic film drama first released in 1941, directed by Frank Capra.  The film stars Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward Arnold, Walter Brennan and Spring Byington.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


When Henry Connell takes over as editor-in-chief of the newspaper The New Bulletin, his first act is to sack all of the staff on his payroll..  One of his victims is Ann Mitchell who is so incensed at her dismissal that, in her final column for the paper, she includes a fake letter from a fictitious John Doe.  In the letter, Doe states that he intends to commit suicide by jumping from the top of City Hall in protest at all of society’s ills.  The public reaction to the article is overwhelmingly enthusiastic and Ann persuades her employers to rehire her so that she can continue the John Doe story, writing articles about his life and his beliefs.  To make the story more credible, a penniless vagrant named John Willoughby is recruited to act the part of John Doe.   Within a matter of weeks, Doe becomes a national hero, his simple philosophy of good neighbourliness and respect for others inspiring communities to set up John Doe clubs the length and breadth of the land.   But then Willoughby learns that he and his loyal followers have been duped.  The entire John Doe enterprise has been secretly funded by newspaper magnate D.B. Norton, who intends to use it to win the presidency of the United States...

After a productive but fraught twelve year stint with Columbia Studios, Frank Capra teamed up with screenwriter Robert Riskin to found his own film production company, Frank Capra Productions.  The first – and only – film the company made was Meet John Doe, a dark melodrama that ruthlessly satirised the American political system at the time. This film was intended primarily to alert Americans to the threat posed by pro-Fascist forces that were operating in the country, Nazi sympathisers who sought to profit from widespread discontent with conventional politicians.  Although the film made a healthy profit, ninety per cent of this was consumed by taxes and Capra had no choice but to wind the company up soon afterwards.

Capra’s reputation was such that, by this stage in his career, he had no difficulty hiring the best actors, and both of his lead performers accepted their roles in Meet John Doe before seeing the script.  Gary Cooper is the perfect casting choice for the part of John Willoughby, and not only because his unassuming everyman persona makes him ideal for the role.  Cooper also had a great talent for portraying inner conflict and moral indignation with sincerity, and this is put to good use in the film’s later, devastatingly poignant sequences.   Barbara Stanwyck is equally impressive as the go-getting journalist who sells her soul to save her job and then goes through Hell to redeem it.  As in her previous Capra films, Stanwyck gives a convincing and sympathetic portrayal of a morally flawed character who undergoes a spiritual transformation by falling in love with a morally superior creature.

Meet John Doe originated as a film treatment by Richard Connell and Robert Presnell, entitled The Life and Death of John Doe, which was based on a story A Reputation, first published in Century Magazine in 1922.  The biggest problem that Capra had with the film was how to end it.  He and Riskin were unable to agree on how the drama should be resolved so five different endings were shot.  Riskin preferred the bleakest ending, in which Willoughby fell to his death from the tower, but this was rejected by a preview audience, who preferred the more upbeat ending that was ultimately selected.

Meet John Doe is one of Capra’s most stirring films, with shades of the Utopian dream depicted in his earlier masterpiece Lost Horizon (1937).  Yet it is also an intensely pessimistic film, offering a view of big business and career politicians that is so deeply cynical that the director would assuredly have been branded an out-and-out Communist had the film been made five years later.   The film remains an important piece of social commentary and its underlying political messages still have a powerful resonance.  Its depiction of the malign influence that low politics and raw capitalism have on the well-being of individuals and society, not to mention the political process itself, is just as relevant today as it was in the 1940s, and parallels with our own time are all too readily apparent.

© James Travers 2009

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