Meet John Doe

Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper carry this film until it loses its way in the confused politics of Frank Capra (for whom I will have to cut a little slack now that I know he was born in Sicily.) She’s a determined newspaper columnist who saves her job by creating a populist hero called John Doe, and then recruits baseball-pitcher-turned-hobo Cooper to impersonate him, generating a movement manipulated by crypto-Fascist media tycoon Edward Arnold. Of course she falls for her creation, and of course he comes to believe in the message he’s made to deliver, that the little people can cure the mess of the world through simple neighborliness. John Doe is supposed to jump off the roof of city hall at midnight on Christmas Eve to protest, you know, the rotten state of things. Of course he actually winds up there, when the fraud becomes the truth. Does he jump? Not even Capra could figure that out, shooting three different endings, none of them satisfactory. Give the guy credit though, he went on to make the highly worthy WWII propaganda series, “Why We Fight,” and later enlivened my schooldays with the Bell Lab documentaries, including Our Mister Sun and Hemo the Magnificent. (1941, TCM/T, n.) *6-*