Meet John Doe - A film for 2025
People on this Reddit will definitely have seen It’s a Wonderful life. They probably will have seen It Happened One Night and Mr Smith Goes to Washington. I think those three movies are Frank Capra’s best movies but I think Meet John Doe from 1941 has a lot of contemporary resonance and has an important message.
Barbara Stanwyk is a journalist about to be sacked in a cost cutting drive. In a last ditch effort to save her job she makes up a story about a ‘forgotten man’ who threatens to kill himself if something isn’t done by politicians to help the poor and unemployed. The article catches the public imagination and saves her job. She hires a down out Gary Cooper to play this ‘John Doe’. Meanwhile the millionaire owner of the Newspaper, seizes on the ‘John Doe Clubs’ being set up and manipulates this into a fake populist ‘grassroots’ political campaign to propel himself into the presidency.
Stanwyk is great here and even Gary Cooper an actor I don’t always love is very well cast as the idealistic dupe.
Unfortunately as it’s in the public domain there doesn’t seem to be a decent restoration available.
People on this Reddit will definitely have seen It’s a Wonderful life. They probably will have seen It Happened One Night and Mr Smith Goes to Washington. I think those three movies are Frank Capra’s best movies but I think Meet John Doe from 1941 has a lot of contemporary resonance and has an important message.
Barbara Stanwyk is a journalist about to be sacked in a cost cutting drive. In a last ditch effort to save her job she makes up a story about a ‘forgotten man’ who threatens to kill himself if something isn’t done by politicians to help the poor and unemployed. The article catches the public imagination and saves her job. She hires a down out Gary Cooper to play this ‘John Doe’. Meanwhile the millionaire owner of the Newspaper, seizes on the ‘John Doe Clubs’ being set up and manipulates this into a fake populist ‘grassroots’ political campaign to propel himself into the presidency.
Stanwyk is great here and even Gary Cooper an actor I don’t always love is very well cast as the idealistic dupe.
Unfortunately as it’s in the public domain there doesn’t seem to be a decent restoration available.