Meet John Doe

Frank Capra, 1941

Films, like people, often have something to say. The manner in which a film says it, however, is a variant that determines a film’s most substantial classification: its genre. The film might be crass, outlandish, and more concerned with body language than with the conversation and become the generic “slapstick” film, for example. Or, in the case of the 1941 film Meet John Doe, the film might exhibit a duality of generic form, combining the emotional resonance of drama with the essence of comedic relief and insisting that it must be listened to and laughed at, alternatively. This is not the first time this particular voice has been heard, although Frank Capra and its Oscar award-winning Best Original Story might argue otherwise. In reality, this film’s voice seems remarkable not for its originality, but for its ability to play the ventriloquist.

In a somewhat sophisticated process of reverse engineering, Meet John Doe took the narrative of the 1939 film Nothing Sacred and turned it on its head. The fast-talking newspaperman is now played by a newspaper girl, Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck), who seeks to secure her job by promoting a lie. Not to be outdone by Nothing Sacred and the poor “poisoned” girl from Warsaw, this lie is embodied by John “Long John” Willoughby (Gary Cooper), a down-and-out worker and former Minor-League pitcher who is hired to pretend to be John Doe—a man bent on commenting on the state of corruption in the country to such a degree that he claims that he’ll commit suicide on Christmas in order to voice his message—John Doe, of course, does not really exist, except in the mind of Mitchell, who created him in a fit of passion (reflected using a close-up of her rapturous face, but more on that later) as a result of her being fired. And yet, in order to sell papers, the Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper, Henry Connell (James Gleason), is convinced by Mitchell to not only continue the charade, but to shamelessly capitalize on John Doe’s popularity by using Willoughby as spokesman. Through a series of fortunate and unfortunate events, John Doe becomes a rallying point for the “little punks” of the country, only to be found out as a fake and forced to contemplate the very suicide that his fake persona advocated. All while, naturally enough, he cultivates a relationship with the vibrant Mitchell by trying to live up to her expectations of what a man like John Doe must be like.

If Nothing Sacred was a call for society to take a look at itself and recognize its hypocrisy, then Meet John Doe was nothing short of a call for the second coming. The references to Christ throughout this film are far from subtle; the end even goes so far as to draw the parallels between John Doe and Christ directly. And yet there is a disturbed quality in this idea throughout the film that can’t be ignored. Mitchell’s fictitious John Doe is a man like her father, a man who was meek, giving, and profoundly wise. Sound familiar? And yet, it isn’t a man like Christ who manages to grab the attention of the populace. Or, rather, it is not because of that man alone that the “little punks” come together, but the result of a substantial amount of funding from a rich and ambitious oil tycoon, D.B. Norton (Edward Arnold). The Sermon on the Mount in this film is an orchestrated affair, meant to provide political advancement for Norton. So when Mitchell in the final scene tells Willoughby that they “can do it over again, but this time it’ll be better, because it’ll be honest,” you’re left to wonder just how much better she expects it to get.

Cameron Burson