NR | 2h 2min | Drama | 1941
Frank Capra’s “Meet John Doe” (1941) is about how our trust in the basic goodness of people can help us live by facing, rather than fleeing, our deepest anxieties. Equally, it’s about how cynicism can lead us to die under the weight of these very anxieties.
The story starts off, familiarly enough, with anxiety driven by failure, something every jobless or homeless man and woman knows intimately. But Capra’s concern isn’t so much about anxieties that flow from failure but those that flow from success.
(L–R) Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck) and Ted Shelton (Rod LaRocque) hear Gary Cooper as Willoughby (Gary Cooper) make an impassioned plea, in “Meet John Doe.” (Warner Bros.)
Anxious over plummeting sales and a promised layoff by her editor, journalist Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck) cooks up a letter from a random reader, who is neither random nor a reader nor even real. Christened “John Doe,” this imaginary person plans to kill himself in protest against everything that’s wrong with the world….