Frank Capra's Forgotten Christmas Classic | Patrick Coffin | CWR
"Meet John Doe" is surprisingly current, even timeless, in its examination of ambition, identity, and repentance
Bring to your mind a scene from a Frank Capra movie: a good man stricken with despair stands at a great height pondering suicide; the snow falls softly all around; it’s Christmas Eve.http://www.typepad.com/site/blogs/6a00d83451b7c369e200d8341c598d53ef/post/compose
No, not It’s a Wonderful Life.
I mean the other Capra movie involving the contemplation of suicide on Christmas Eve: the unsung 1941 classic Meet John Doe, that lesser-known of Capra’s odes to Everyman.
Meet John Doe is a story of careers lost, ambitions thwarted, and love unrequited. Well, not quite. In today’s parlance, it’s complicated. Feisty reporter Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck) has been fired from her gig at the newspaper. When told she owes her boss one last column, she bangs off an angry letter to the editor, “a protest against man’s inhumanity to man and the state of the world.” The last line is a threat to jump off City Hall at midnight on Christmas Eve. And she signs it “John Doe,” an imaginary character who channels her resentment at being let go by her new boss, Mr. Cannell (James Gleason).
That last column generates so much interest in the readers that Cannell decides to put an ad out for ne’re-do-wells who’d like to make some money posing for photos as an angry John Doe. They want a human tabula rasa, a willing candidate for an extreme media makeover.
After an amusing audition montage, who ambles in but a rugged, half-starved bush league pitcher named Long John Willoughby (Gary Cooper at his understated best). Lanky Long John has fallen on hard times and is now accompanied by his rail-riding pal, the Colonel (Walter Brennan), a confirmed hobo and anti-establishment sage. The Colonel smells corruption everywhere and he spends the rest of the movie trying to pull his boxcar buddy away from the “heelots.” Screenwriter Robert Riskin put together one of filmdom’s great comedy speeches, which is worth quoting at some length:
Comments