Frank Capra | Meet John Doe / 1941

fighting for the common man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Riskin (screenplay, based on a story by Richard Connell and Robert Presnell, Sr.), Frank Capra (director) Meet John Doe / 1941

 

More than almost any other filmmaker in Hollywood, Frank Capra made films that were centered on issues of faith and belief—not necessarily “religious” belief (although he certainly didn’t preclude that as a concern) but on a belief in American values and the common goodness of the country’s everyday citizens. Particularly in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Meet John Doe Capra focuses on battles between the believers—generally everyday Americans—and the cynics—politicians, the wealthy, and culturally elite. I might have chosen any of these films and others to discuss this central sentimentally-conceived tenant behind much of his film-making, but certainly the most fascinating and problematic of these works is his 1941 box-office success, Meet John Doe.

 

     This film differs from the others, in part, because the central hero’s love interest, Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck) is in league with the devil, and for much of the film, it appears, despite her very ordinary living conditions, is on the side of the cynics, a situation that creates all sorts quandaries for both Robert Riskin’s plot and Capra’s themes, to say nothing how it demands Stanwyck to portray a character who is often at war with herself.  

      If nothing else, the middle position in which the character, Mitchell, discovers herself, develops a new dimension in Capra’s thinking that ultimately challenges his otherwise quite simplistic, formulaic, and, yes, “Capracorn” vision of good and evil, since it requires that both sides negotiate with the figure in this new middle ground.

     Of course, there was something similar in the character of “Babe” Bennett (Jean Arthur) in Mr. Deeds, but her newspaper stories about him do not necessarily ally her with the political and wealthy; and, in the end, she serves more as a kind of knowledgeable guide for the hick hero, much as Jean Arthur also served the rube senator played by James Stewart in Mr. Smith.

     Stanwyck, on the other hand, is an out-and-out liar who first convinces her new newspaper manager, Henry Connell (James Gleason) to betray any of his journalistic principles by going along with her deceit (a letter supposedly from an angry everyday John Doe, but actually written by her) and, soon after, attaches herself with the paper’s evil owner, D. B. Norton (Edward Arnold), who is only too happy to use her lie for his devious political purposes. This Eve is able even to get the down-and-out hobo, Long John Willoughby (Gary Cooper) to go along with her mendacity by playing John Doe himself, signing a copy of the fraudulent letter. Never before or after was there a more devious Capra heroine.

    Only Willoughby’s mouth-organ playing-buddy, The Colonel (Walter Brennan), who sees a “heelot” in nearly everyone he meets, smells a skunk, and attempts to get his handsome baseball-playing friend back as his sole companion—which inserts a darker sort of sub-theme into this film that is missing from nearly all of Capra’s other fables.

     Despite his extreme religious and political conservatism (Brennan described all those who supported John F. Kennedy as “communists” and celebrated the murders of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy), no one has played so many begrudgingly gruff but loyal male companions. As the writers of Mark Rappaport’s Silver Screen: Color Me Lavendar (1997) remind us through Dan Butler’s narration, Brennan has perhaps played more “grizzled old prospector” roles—the Western and Gangster hero’s best friend who, serving up a good cup of coffee, keeps him away from women and serves him as a sort of symbolic “housewife”—than any other screen actor of the day. And his role of “Colonel” in this film is among the most obvious of these semi-coded gay figures as he struggles to pull Long John Willoughby away from the claws of Mitchell and off with him alone to the Columbia River Country. For a short while, in fact, he succeeds, Willoughby joining him after his first impromptu speech as he scurries back to their hobo paradise of sleeping under the stars where their joint sessions of harmonica playing hint that it may not be the only instrument they share and with which they play. In this work the stock figure has never made it so clear that he wants the handsome Cooper (in real life a bisexual who early on in his career leaned more heavily toward the gay life) all to himself, and, in fact, when Willoughby becomes entrapped in Mitchell’s and her evil friend’s web, he finally is forced to abandon his “best buddy.” No women are permitted in this man’s world!

   Whether Brennan himself or even the Republican-voting Capra comprehended what these stock roles betrayed about male/male relationships doesn’t matter; the liberal writer Robert Riskin evidently knew quite well what such friendships represented. For financial reasons and their differing views, Riskin and Capra were not a happy couple during the making this movie, Riskin’s last collaboration in helping the director to create his “Capra touch.”

     If nothing else, Mitchell’s open attempts to “clean-up” and civilize her man were continually at war with the Colonel’s attempts to keep him rough and unshaven in the wilds. If she wins, it’s only, as he puts it, by a foul ball.

      At the same time, in Meet John Doe the two major opposing forces—the believers and the cynics—are portrayed in more extreme terms than in any of Capra’s other films. In Mr. Deeds, Mr. Smith, and It’s a Wonderful Life the cynics primarily seek out money—although certainly Jim Taylor (played once again by Edward Arnold) wanted more than “just” money in buying Senator Paine’s (Claude Rains) vote. But this time around, the Edward Arnold character, Norton, is presented more like a would-be Hitler, even quoting Nazi theory, a man determined to alter the very constitution of the US if he achieves his goals.

     The ordinary believers in this film are portrayed less like ordinary yokels than as European peasants, dressed up in long dresses and colorful costumes who are warned by the Millsville Mayor (Gene Lockhart) “to walk slow” like they do when they come to pay their taxes. The members of what become the John Doe clubs seem not only to be ordinary, but members of some forgotten slave class of American workers who are so stupid that they might turn on a stranger (and actually do) if he glanced at them in the wrong way. They are both mean and subservient in a manner that could hardly be imagined in George Bailey’s (of It’s a Wonderful Life) Bedford Falls, even after his supposed non-existence.

      Mitchell is herself a contradictory character, both a hard-boiled cynic (a character Stanwyck played in many movies) and a true believer. If she is a liar, she still grows to believe in her own lies, based on her father’s diary that her angelic mother (Spring Byington) passes on to her. In other words, she’s grown up with good values, but has clearly had to abandon many of her moral principles in order to support her mother, herself, and others. Yet that doesn’t quite explain why, even after she discovers Norton’s evil plans to use the John Doe clubs to get elected, she continues to accept his gifts (a mink coat and a diamond bracelet) and meets with some of the most evil-minded men in Capra’s large catalogue of selfish monsters. Yes, she demurs, but very slightly, and only after Willoughby—wised up by the hard-headed editor, Connell, to what’s really going on—confronts the coven with what he now knows.

     Capra, one must admit, is a genius at demonstrating just how the evil get their way: Norton, quick-printing a special newspaper edition proclaiming Joe as a fraud, cutting the sound to Joe’s microphone, and addressing the rain-soaked yokels himself to proclaim Joe’s lack of integrity, storms over the dreams of the gathered thousands, leaving Joe/Willoughby no voice or alternatives, since he has been forced to reject Mitchell and The Colonel has long since slinked off into his beloved wilderness.

       Wracked with guilt, our heroine, Mitchell must suffer a kind of temporary hell, as she comes down with a fever and takes to bed.

      In any ordinary Capra film, now would be the time for the chastened hero to perceive not only the error of his ways but to find redemption and new possibilities for belief in the arms of his wife or would-be lover. But this time around Capra and his writer have seemingly boxed themselves in. The imaginary John Doe had threatened to symbolize the injustices of the world with his own suicide, and through Mitchell’s machinations, she has now entrapped a real person within her suicidal fantasies.

    John Doe, the plot insists, must go—must jump off the ledge of city hall if for no other reason than to redeem his fellow men who have failed to maintain their faith. Despite her “fever,” Mitchell, as if rising from the dead, rushes out to save her man, just as the film’s evil-doers gather to stop Joe from going through his pledge. In other words, Mitchell once again, unintentionally this time, allies herself with the men of selfish intent. The plot, accordingly, demands Joe’s death, if for other reason than to complete the Christian myth the director and writer have woven into their tale.

       Early preview audiences didn’t like it one little bit. And Capra and Riskin were forced to revise their ending, ridiculously calling for Stanwyck to reiterate the Christian message while trying to dissuade her lover from completing his own sacrifice, with the would-be masterminds of human destiny looking on in dour delight. Like any fictional woman facing a situation she cannot resolve, Mitchell swoons, forcing Joe to take her into his arms. By doing so, however, he fails to resolve the very issues which the movie’s mythology has forced us to face. As the “couple” walk away into love, any faith in the future has to come from the good wishes of those in the audience instead of anything we have witnessed on the screen.

       Meet John Doe, in other words, is Capra’s very best and very worst film simultaneously. It reveals all of his concerns, his epic determination to lead his audiences through deep doubts into a world of absolute faith in anything and everything American; but it also demonstrates just how hokey and unbelievable those values (predictably—and interestingly—represented primarily by male figures) really are. We are neither a society of monsters ready to pounce on individual freedom in order to get what we want, nor a society of local-yokels dressed up like peasants who, if we had our say, might dance away our days in the total bliss of simple living. Like Mitchell, we are more often a confused folk, trying to balance our moral values with the realities of daily survival, weaving our highest ideals into the tapestry threaded with our level-headed doubt and quick wits. Good and evil, quite obviously, are not as clear and simple as Capra would have liked them to have been.

 

Los Angeles, January 7, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2016).