The scene is a black tie dinner party, where crystal chandeliers hang from the ceiling and flames flicker from a great stone fireplace. In walks Long John Willoughby, a failed baseball player employed by the man seated at the head of the table, newspaper publisher D.B. Norton. John is supposed to be at a political convention, endorsing Norton for president in a rousing speech, but instead, he’s arrived to deliver a different message.
“You sit there back with your big cigars and think of deliberately killing an idea that’s made millions of people a little bit happier,” he snarls at the men in tuxedos. “[This] may be the one thing capable of saving this cockeyed world, yet you sit back there on your fat hulks and tell me you’ll kill it if you can’t use it. Well you go ahead and try! You couldn’t do it in a million years with all your radio stations and all your power, because it’s bigger than whether I’m a fake, it’s bigger than your ambitions and it’s bigger than all the bracelets and fur coats in the world. And that’s exactly what I’m going down there to tell those people.”
John’s words are supposed to be a repudiation of greed and cynicism. It’s the first honest speech he delivers in the 1941 drama Meet John Doe, and the only one he writes himself. It’s also the kind of dialogue viewers had come to expect from the film’s director, Frank Capra, who specialized in stirring everyman movies, like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
But this is not Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. In the next scene, John is nearly killed by a furious mob. He survives, only to make plans to jump off a building. While it has many of the hallmarks of a classic Capra film, Meet John Doe is a surprisingly pessimistic movie, one that paints the media as a tool of manipulation, the rich as craven plutocrats, and the American citizen as a dangerous idiot, easily duped by a good story.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Capra made massively popular movies that swept both the Oscars and the box office. He had a style that his critics called “Capracorn,” hopeful, idealistic, and maybe a little schmaltzy. This tone is on full display in what the Americanist Glenn Alan Phelps calls Capra’s four “populist” movies: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and Meet John Doe. In each of these stories, Phelps writes, “a simple, unassuming young man from small-town America is thrust by circumstances into a situation in which he is confronted with the power and corruption of urban industrialists, corporate lawyers, bankers, and crooked politicians.” However, “through the determined application of the virtues of honesty, goodness, and idealism, the ‘common man’ triumphs over this conspiracy of evil.”