TV Note: "Meet John Doe" (8/2)

[David Shasha]

"Meet John Doe" will be screened on Truner Classic Movies late Saturday/early Sunday, August 2nd at 12:00 midnight

D.B. Norton IS John Doe: Watching Frank Capra’s “Meet John Doe” in Trumpworld

 

During his illustrious career the great Hollywood director Frank Capra produced a legendary series of socially-conscious films that have over time become indelible expressions of a critical strain of American thought about our socio-economic system.

 

The series began with “American Madness” (1932), which starred Walter Huston as a harried bank president fighting the impending Depression and trying to save his depositors from the predatory Wall Street vultures coming to swoop down on them. 

 

The next entry was “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town” (1936), a charming, yet ominous fable about an American dreamer named Longfellow Deeds, played by the iconic Gary Cooper, who inherited a large sum of money that he tries to give away to the poor in the form of land grants and is marked as a lunatic. 

 

And then there was Capra’s adaptation of the George S. Kaufman-Moss Hart play “You Can’t Take it with You” (1938) which pits another eccentric, this time a free-spirited patriarch played by Lionel Barrymore, squaring off against a real estate magnate played by Edward Arnold.  The two men battle over Barrymore’s home, its place in a big real estate development, and ultimately over what American values really are and who controls our society.

 

“Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (1939) brings the very idealistic and very naïve Jefferson Smith (played by Jimmy Stewart), the “Boy Ranger,” to a Washington rife with corruption where his head comes close to being chopped off, before he is miraculously saved at the very last moment by a fortuitous change of conscience in one of the corrupt figures who has hitherto persecuted him viciously. 

 

The cycle of socially-conscious movies ended with the perennial Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) that also starred Stewart, this time as a small-time head of a savings-and-loan who tries to remain afloat during the Depression.  His George Bailey is set upon by a predatory banker, played by Lionel Barrymore as the penultimate villain.  Bailey tries to commit suicide and is saved at the last minute by his guardian angel.

 

These movies have retained their critical power in spite of the fact that Capra has often been wrongly reduced to a homespun cliché in his aggressive fight for the little guy.  The movies continue to promote the ideals of American Democracy and attack those who would use our economic system for their own private benefit.

 

In May 1941, scant months before the US entry into World War II, in which Capra also had a role to play, he released “Meet John Doe,” perhaps his most cynical take on the American condition; a movie that is far darker and more oppressive than any of the others in this classic cycle.

 

“Meet John Doe” deals with media and political corruption on an epic scale: After presenting idealistic types for many years, Capra now focuses on a real bunch of stinkers without a shred of moral compunction.

 

The story begins with the hostile corporate takeover of a newspaper called The Bulletin.  The “New” Bulletin shakes things up by firing most of its staff and instituting a tabloid policy; it is a critical motif that can also be seen in Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane,” released that same year.

 

The new editor, Henry Connell, played by James Gleason, wants sensational stories to help boost circulation.  Writer Ann Mitchell, played by Barbara Stanwyck, is fired but desperately pleads with Connell to let her keep her job.  After he refuses, she concocts a story about a poor “John Doe” who has had it with the world and intends to take his own life.  She invents a letter written by the man and has it printed in the next edition of the paper.

 

The article becomes a huge media sensation and everyone wants to know who this “John Doe” is.

 

We are then off to the proverbial races.

 

The paper then puts out a covert call for potential “actors” to play the part of John Doe.  Among the hobos who show up for the cash prize is one John Willoughby, played by Gary Cooper (who previously played Longfellow Deeds), who happily agrees to go along with the charade.

 

What is interesting in “Meet John Doe,” separating it from all the other Capra classics, is that its protagonists are all corrupt in one way or another.  There are no heroes or heroines here. 

 

Many have found the movie overly dark and cynical and ultimately oppressive.  After the release of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” a movie that had the audience joyfully rooting for the idealistic waif, Capra left his home studio Columbia and moved into independent production.  “Meet John Doe” was his first statement outside the Hollywood studio system.  His usual wacky pithiness is undercut in “Doe” by a wordy preachiness that often taxes the viewer.  It is a very long, drawn-out movie that has stretches of dogmatic speechifying in a truly dystopian vein.

 

Walter Brennan plays Cooper’s friend the Colonel in a way that provides a critical check on the shenanigans, but his voice is marginalized by the sheer effrontery of the cynical manipulations of the main protagonists and their brazen concern for money and power.

 

The new owner of The Bulletin is D.B. Norton, played by “Mr. Smith” villain Edward Arnold.  Norton is a frightening monster who will use the John Doe phenomenon as his ticket to political power.  As John Doe becomes an idol to the masses, Norton organizes a Third Party to capitalize on the movement.

 

Norton’s aim, and does this sound familiar, is to exploit the yokels to push forward his oligarchic agenda which would allow the rich and powerful to become even more rich and powerful.

 

There is a critical scene towards the end of the movie which precedes the tumult that occurs at the political convention for the new John Doe Party that gives the game away: Norton sits at the head of a table filled with yes-men and lackeys where he spells out in very precise terms how he will make suckers out of the masses and install himself as America’s strongman in order to garner more financial and political capital and further bleed the country dry.

 

As I was watching the scene I could not help but think that Norton was Donald Trump – with one crucial difference: Norton deploys John Doe as the face of the movement while working as puppeteer behind the scenes to achieve his nefarious aims.

 

In the current situation Trump is not only the man behind the scenes, but is playing the John Doe part himself.

 

He is both D.B. Norton the rich mogul and John Doe the hobo prophet at one and the same time!

 

Norton was afraid of public exposure.  He used John Doe as the face of the movement that he would then co-opt for his wicked purposes.

 

Unlike Norton, Trump has no such compunctions.

 

Trump has in fact has made no secret of his misbegotten wealth, spitting in the face of convention by not releasing his tax returns.  More than this, he has now appointed the scions of Wall Street and Corporate America, and various Washington insiders to his administration in a brazen repudiation of everything he promised to his idiot supporters on the campaign trail.

 

D.B. Nortons were by no means anomalous in American politics.  Capra himself recycled the character from “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” where Edward Arnold played Boss Jim Taylor, the very same corrupt manipulator who worked outside the public eye to impose his oligarchic policies on the political system.

 

And again, Taylor had stooge frontmen like Claude Rains’ Senator Paine to do the dirty work for him.

 

What is different today is that Trump is both the power behind the throne, as well as the man sitting on that throne.

 

The actual duplicity and political slight-of-hand that has always been standard in the attempt by the rich to control our socio-economic system has now been utterly eliminated by the Trump phenomenon.  Trump has brazenly ripped the lid off of the standard pretenses and simply gone directly at the system, asserting his power in the most overt manner. 

 

Trump has no shame in this naked power grab as he has duplicitously used the “John Doe” populist ethos in order to get elected.  And to do this he has ever-so-skillfully deployed his Reality TV persona in a way that has made him almost completely immune from critical investigation.  He has upended whatever rationality was left in our political system and turned it into pure Idiocracy.

 

As we continue to see his rollout of cabinet appointments and the proffering of political largesse to the rich and famous in a way that smacks of pure Crony Capitalism and insider corruption, Trump, unlike Norton, has no reticence as he feels that he has complete mastery over the media; an entity that has been completely impotent when it comes to keeping the current political process in check.

 

Walter Brennan’s Colonel is not going to be miraculously resurrected to replace the odious Wolf Blitzer at CNN.

 

In “Meet John Doe” Frank Capra spoke to the impending calamity of Hitlerite Fascism and World War.  He had little of his usual cheery screwball optimism and made a movie that was as dark and foreboding as any in his canon. 

 

The movie has much to teach us about where we are at the current moment.

 

We are now being led by a malignant oligarch with serious anti-Democratic Fascist values and beliefs who has no time for political niceties or behavioral norms as we have previously understood them.

 

In “Meet John Doe” there is still the veneer of normalcy, as corruption must still work in stealth.

 

In Trumpworld there is no stealth and no fig leaf of normalcy.  Anything goes in a world that has no actual connection to morality as we once knew it.  And this is the result of a cultural degeneration that rejects American Constitutional Democracy in favor of a chauvinist Nationalism that harbors racism, sexism, xenophobia, and barbarous cruelty.  

 

“Meet John Doe” has now become a cautionary tale that can show us how the various channels of evil can be consolidated under a very frightening cult of personality, which has sadly become normalized by a predatory media whose values are those of the New Idiocracy that continues to engulf us and wipe out what little dignity we might have left as a country.

  

 

David Shasha

 

From SHU 776, February 8, 2017