Meet John Doe (1941)

Directed by Frank Capra. Starring Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, James Gleason, Edward Arnold, Walter Brennan, Spring Byington, Gene Lockhart, Rod La Rocque, Regis Toomey, Irving Bacon.

The Capra-corn model grows mold (or cob rot?) while repeating some of the director’s most cherished themes of idealism, decency, and the common man standing up against greedy politicians and capitalist fat-cats, laid on thick with an abundance of obvious speeches that strain to whip up the unruly mob (and any audience members who weren’t already convinced by the heavy-handed inspiration in his earlier pictures like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town). As in the latter film, cynical big city reporter Ann Mitchell (Stanwyck, in the standard Jean Arthur role) uses a soft-spoken rube in the form of gentle giant Cooper for her own gain, but it gets way out of hand. He’s a former bush-league-ballplayer-turned-drifter named John Willoughby—dubbed “John Doe”—who becomes a grass-roots celebrity as a voice for the little man, but the strings are being pulled by (who else?) a corrupt industrialist and his cronies. A few rabble-rousing moments, zesty supporting performances, and prescient touches, like the old newspaper slogan “Free press means free people” being chipped away for the replacement plaque, “A streamlined newspaper for a streamlined age,” but its message is hammered home at excessive length and results in a spongy impact—pretty well covered already in the New Testament, this brand of anti-“heelot” resonance works best with a much angrier bite (à la A Face in the Crowd, Network, et al). This crew, however, is too quixotic for any of that—only Cooper could ever wax indulgently about spanking Stanwyck in a dream and make it sound wholesome enough to be blasé. Screenplay by Robert Riskin from a Richard Connell short story (“A Reputation”).

54/100