(See Cover)
The famous Hollywood team of Director Frank Capra & Writer Robert Riskin have wowed the public with several fairly intimate little pictures including It Happened One Night and You Can't Take It With You. They have also wowed the public with whoppers: Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, Lost Horizon. Director Capra, working without his Alter Ego Riskin, wowed the public with the heroic scale of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The bigger these pictures have gotten, the simpler have been their basic sentiments. The vast Tibetan spaces of Lost Horizon enclosed the theme BE KIND (Capra's own description). Mr. Deeds went to town to preach LOVE YOUR FELLOW MAN (ditto). Among the marbles of Washington, Mr. Smith found the meaning of LOVE YOUR COUNTRY.
Next week Warner Brothers releases the biggest Capra-Riskin picture to date, Meet John Doe. Capra-Riskin produced it independently, spent seven months on it and $1,100,000. They sat down at a great Hollywoodian organ, used every last stop, smote every key on every manual. Yet they built their music around one of the simplest and oldest of themes: LOVE THY NEIGHBOR.
The Story. Adapted by Writer Riskin from an old Century magazine story called A Reputation by Richard Connell, Meet John Doe begins modestly enough in the office of a newspaper which is firing many tried & true employes. A young girl columnist (Barbara Stanwyck) angrily invents as her last column a letter signed John Doe stating that he will protest against civic and general corruption by jumping from the top of City Hall on Christmas Eve. When the fake is about to be disclosed, the girl gets her job back by suggesting that an appropriate John Doe be hired and interviewed daily. For this purpose the paper engages a gawkingly uncouth but handsome bush-league baseball pitcher who is out of work. John Doe's press and radio utterances, written by the girl, are naive but manly sermons on Love Thy Neighbor, and they touch local and then national hearts.
Doe finally sells himself on the cause when confronted by one of the dozens of mushrooming John Doe Clubs. In a small town he hears the local soda jerker (Regis Toomey) tell how Love Thy Neighbor really works. In this scene a number of Hollywood types give Capra-Riskin some of the best character acting on film. Thereafter Doe makes a nationwide tour, falls in love with the girl writer, acquires such a nationwide reputation that his face appears on the cover of TIME.*
It now appears that the newspaper publisher, a bulky, sinister, pince-nez-polishing fascist (Edward Arnold), has always intended to use the John Doe Clubs to get himself elected President and regiment the U. S. people into some sense. Doe learns this from the newspaper editor (James Gleason), a patriot who has got drunk with the horror of the idea. The notion of having the prime patriotic appeal of the picture delivered by a soused journalist (and ex-soldier) is a crowning piece of Capra-Riskin-Gleason virtuosity.
When Doe tries to warn his convention, the publisher exposes him as a fake and his private storm troopers turn the crowd against Doe. Outcast, Doe decides that he can only convince his following of his sincerity by really jumping off the City Hall tower on Christmas Eve.