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At this point Capra-Riskin ran into trouble. In the original version the girl's lovelorn pleading worked. But a preview-audience felt that the ending was not strong enough for what had preceded. For a while Capra-Riskin thought they would have to make Doe jump. They finally landed on the present ending—the girl not only tells Doe of her love but also reminds him that what he is trying to do has already been done, unsurpassably —by Jesus.
The Picture has many excellent, many not so excellent details, and will doubtless accent for millions the virtues of neighborly compassion. Fundamentally there is just one thing wrong with it. When an organist draws on the full resources of his instrument, as have Messrs. Capra & Riskin in invoking almost every great emotional appeal from the Nativity to The Star Spangled Banner, the largest possible music had better come out. Anything else may topple artistically from sheer pompous top-heaviness. When Capra-Riskin open up the cinema organ in Meet John Doe, what comes out is not solid but uncertain musical structure (in the middle of the picture they even fall back on coy effects with a small dog), not so much Bachian power as Lisztian super-schmalz. Their organ often sounds not so much a classic organ as a Mighty Wurlitzer—its tremolos too tremulous, its diapasons too windy. And in treating the theme of Love Thy Neighbor they are competing with some of the noblest products of human art.
The Cowboy and the Ladies. Both the sentimentality and the rhetoric of Meet John Doe profit greatly by its star, whose personality has a great tendency to de-schmalz sentiment and de-rant rhetoric. Tens of thousands of fans know that Gary Cooper is 6 feet 2¾ inches tall, 175 pounds heavy, 40 years old, and that if he grew a beard he would look rather like Abraham Lincoln. To his friends he is "Coop." Though special tributes are often paid him where young women gather, he escapes such masculine calumny as sometimes finds its way toward the ears of Clark Gable. Boyfriends and husbands watch him without defensive squirming. Had Coop been a longshoreman he might well have been the most popular, if not the most active, man at the waterfront bars. Had he gone to Yale he might well have been the Most Popular Man in his class. As it was, he went to Hollywood and became the most popular man in the nation—an ideal choice for Capra-Riskin's Meet John Doe.
A popular misconception holds that he was a rootin', tootin' cowboy who suddenly gawked into the klieg lights. This is not strictly true. Although he is at home there, the range was never his profession. His father, Charles Henry Cooper, was a lawyer of Bedfordshire, England, who in 1886 moved to the U. S. and the raucous gold town of Helena, Mont. There he married a local girl, acquired a small cattle ranch, but spent most of his time at law and politics which eventually brought him a justiceship of the Montana Supreme Court.