MEET JOHN DOPE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 214, 30 July 1943, Page 13

MEET JOHN DOPE

(Warner Bros.)

MEET JOHN DOE is the most ambitious effort of Director Frank Capra in collaboration with Hollywood’s highest-paid scenarist, Robert

Riskin, It cost 1,100,000 dollars, Eight months were spent in preparing the script, six months in shooting it, two months in cutting and editing. The cast gleams with stars. But this time Messrs. Capra and Riskin have made a molehill out of a mountain of labour. Or, to be classical, I might quote Horace and say that the mountain has laboured and brought forth a mouse. Well, perhaps not a mouse, but a nice old sheep-very woolly and amiably ineffective. Meet John Doe propounds a social philosophy not unknown to _ radio listeners in this country. Love Thy Neighbour is its theme-a simple theme and a noble one, which demands treatment of the same quality. But for all their dollars, all their months of work, all their stars, and all their good intentions, Messrs. Capra and Riskin find it as much beyond their powers as others who have attempted the same task, When they should be simple they are merely naive; instead of nobility there is half-baked sentiment and woolly idealism; too much talking and not enough straight thinking. Once or twice, Tll admit, the film does start to scale the heights, but more. often it wallows in platitude and long-winded rhetoric. And yet the story had promise. It is about a girl columnist (Barbara Stanwyck), who, in a fit of anger, inserts into her column a bogus letter purporting to come from a man who declares that he is so sickened by the state of the world that he intends to jump off the top of the City Hall on Christmas Eve in protest. The letter is signed "John Doe," and is an immediate sensation. In order to keep the hoax going and the paper’s circulation soaring, an out-of-work baseball player (Gary Cooper), is hired to impersonate "John Doe." With the girl acting as his mouthpiece, the fame and philosophy of John Doe spreads all over the U.S.A. He becomes the symbol, the apotheosis, of the "little man," and thousands of "John Doe Clubs" spring into existence, the members of which are pledged to love their neighbours. Not until it is almost too late does John Doe discover that behind the whole movement is the sinister figure of a Big Business Fascist (Edward Arnold), who intends to harness the vague enthusiasm of the Dopefed masses for the purpose of getting himself elected President-Dictator of the U.S.A. When John Doe rebels, he is exposed as a hoax, and disappears in disgrace. But on Christmas Eve he turns up on top of the City Hall to carry out the original suicide threat, and so redeem himself in the eyes of the disillusioned "little men." Doe doesn’t jump — but even if he had it wouldn’t have redeemed the picture. The only thing that might have done that would have been to scrap nearly everything and start all over again. It would not have been necessary to scrap Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan, who wrestle manfully with the problems of the script and, indeed,

save the film from complete collapse. But Barbara Stanwyck, threshing around gives the appearance of being well out of her depth. Messrs. Capra and Riskin certainly are,