Monday, August 30, 2010
Try as I might, I’ve always found the films of director Frank Capra hard to swallow. Not that they aren’t invariably thoughtful, well-made, well-cast pictures with a distinctive and consistent narrative throughline (each in its own way glorifying the American Everyman). It’s just that Capra’s expressions of can-do optimism, civic pride and patriotism — born of his status as a first-generation Sicilian immigrant who came to our shores at age 6 — are just as consistently too corny by half, as though he’s projecting with a bullhorn to the back row of the theater, to ensure that his particular cinematic evangelism nails the audience right between the eyes. There is little, if any, nuance in a Capra film.1
Yet, Capra’s excessive tendencies have detracted neither from his enduring popularity — certain of his films are more well regarded now, in fact, than they were upon their initial release — nor the widespread use of the adjective Capraesque to describe stories told in his fashion. Certainly Capra’s unabashed earnestness had greater appeal during the hard times that coincided with his ascendancy, but it’s still easy to imagine some incredulity and eye-rolling in theaters exhibiting his films during their initial release.
I must admit I’m impressed, though, when I point out that two of Capra’s films — with uncharacteristic cynicism, however briefly indulged — make serious overtures toward the attempted suicides of their protagonists: his most popular film, 1946’s It’s a Wonderful Life (whose very title reeks of Capra’s pie-eyed optimism) and the film I watched Sunday evening, 1941’s Meet John Doe, starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck.
The picture opens with fired newspaper columnist Ann Mitchell (Stanwyck) turning in a final assignment in which she invents a phony John Doe who rails against the inequities of society and announces that, as an act of protest, he’s going to leap from the roof of City Hall.2 It ends with Cooper — as the newspaper’s made-to-order populist hero, John Willoughby — ascending to that very roof, prepared to follow through on a promise he never made in the first place. Interestingly, Capra shot and screened multiple endings for test audiences, including one ending in which Cooper actually jumps.3
Wouldn’t you love to see what that test audience wrote on their comment cards? Can you imagine the collective gasp that went up in that theater? Or the outrage of moviegoers incensed at Capra for offing Gary freaking Cooper in order to make his point?
Meet John Doe arrived in theaters on May 3, 1941, making it just barely a prewar film and, for that matter, just barely, if at all, a post-Depression film. It was Capra’s follow-up to 1939’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and despite a difference of only two years, one almost feels that the films were shot out of order — that Doe’s emphasis on the downtrodden would have been more resonant than Smith’s political idealism in its time, and vice versa.
As it stands, though, Doe doesn’t acknowledge the Depression so much as delineate the sharp divide in America between the haves and the have-nots (though it preaches, via Walter Brennan as John’s traveling companion, the Colonel, of the inherent integrity and honor of the latter). The film is essentially a fanfare for the common man, trumpeting those virtues of hard work, honesty, fair dealing and basic decency that today we ascribe to the American middle class and illustrating how those virtues can be upended by the ambitions of the powerful and wealthy figures who control both the purse strings and the puppet strings in America.
All of which lends Meet John Doe an air of timelessness, even 70 years hence — especially given the remarkable coincidence of my having selected the film for viewing4 on the same day The New York Times published Frank Rich’s column about the billionaires bankrolling the populist Tea Party movement. (Rich points back to the du Pont brothers’ creation of the American Liberty League in 1934 with an eye toward taking down F.D.R. and his New Deal “socialism,” illustrating that Capra had at hand his own tailor-made template for the shadow figures who pull the strings in Doe.)
In this respect, honorable mention is due the venerable character actor Edward Arnold, who, as newspaper tycoon D.B. Norton, gives one of the most understated performances I’ve ever seen, particularly given its time and the tone and pacing of the story that surrounds him.
There has been a pinballing urgency in the setup — Ann scheming her revenge, then enlisting her managing editor, Henry Connell (James Gleason) in the hoax — and a giddy momentum that takes hold after Cooper emerges as their John Doe. But the mayhem subsides for the introduction of Norton, who sits unperturbed, Sphinx-like behind his great desk, measuring his responses, choosing his words thoughtfully, carefully, making his subjects wait for his decrees, letting the air around him grow almost perfectly still before finally breaking his silence in the calmest, deepest, most sonorous tones, like a man who has just blown a smoke ring and doesn’t want to disrupt it with his own bluster. Norton lulls our protagonists and us into a false sense of security, setting up an Act III reversal that we feel foolish for not having seen coming down Main Street, all horns and cymbals.
It’s a shame, then, that Capra undermines the best of his storytelling by weighing it down with the worst of his tendencies. Arguably the finest moment in the entire film is a barroom scene in which a drunken Connell tells John Willoughby why he loves America by way of describing how he and his father enlisted together to fight in World War I and served in the same platoon. It is a lean, effective piece of writing devastatingly delivered by Gleason.
On the other hand, the picture comes to a screeching halt in a sequence in which Willoughby meets with one small town’s “John Doe Club,” comprised of citizens inspired by his example. A dozen or so card-carrying members stand in a clump around earnest, big-hearted soda jerk Bert Hanson (Regis Toomey) as he explains in agonizingly explicit detail how he and his wife made the effort to know their neighbors better and cast aside their prejudices and learned what they all had in common and lent a helping hand to those who needed it and on and on until I thought the entire movie had just given up on narrative structure altogether in favor of characters delivering exposition directly to the camera. I wasn’t watching the clock, but in screen time it was an eternity, the equivalent of dead air on a radio station.
Ultimately, the film’s saving grace, the glue holding it all in place, is Stanwyck, who over a long career tackled so many different roles excellently and effortlessly. Even here, with Capra’s shmaltz machine dialed all the way up to 11, she somehow manages to sell the director’s agenda without ever damaging her own credibility.
I wish I could say Cooper was a match his leading lady, but there are straight men and there are stiff men, and here, as in Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire, the trouble with Cooper’s being the strong silent type is that he lacks the necessary charisma not only to make a strong impression alongside Stanwyck but even to stand out among a much more colorful supporting cast. We don’t wonder why Ann loves John Doe, and we root for him because he’s Gary Cooper, but a part of us still wishes he were James Stewart, who would at least wring some emotion out of us in exchange for the price of admission.
You’d think Capra of all people would wish for that, too.
1 Among Capra’s more popular titles, the exception is 1934’s It Happened One Night, as intelligent, polished and watertight a romantic comedy as has ever been committed to film.
2 Never mind that there’s a whole other film to be made here about the horrendous breach of journalistic ethics Ann — and, subsequently, her bosses — commits by inventing a story out of thin air. (Ask Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass how well that worked out for them.) The picture glosses over such legalities as it steamrolls toward its overarching theme, effectively dismissing the audience’s suspension of disbelief as a foregone conclusion.
3 I don’t believe I’m spoiling anything here.
4 We chose it strictly on the basis of Adriane’s having liked Barbara Stanwyck in the previous night’s entertainment, Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve. (To wit: What’s not to like about Barbara Stanwyck?)
