Actually, building that latter association\u2014America = antifascism\u2014serves as the film\u2019s very raison d\u2019\u00eatre<\/em>, as the U.S. film industry rose to the occasion of the emerging second world war and, along the way, helped to redefine the \u201cAmerican Way\u201d in contrast <\/em>to European and Asian fascism in ways that have lasted eight decades, despite current right-wing efforts to denigrate antifascism\u2014or \u2018antifa\u2019\u2014as radical and un-American. To revisit Meet John Doe<\/em>\u2014and its dire warnings about the seeds of domestic fascism lying in our democratic soil\u2014is to recall that antifascism is as American as baseball, Capra films, and Gary Cooper\u2019s kisser. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Just months before Meet John Doe\u2019s <\/em>release, President Franklin Roosevelt coined the \u201cFour Freedoms\u201d: freedom from <\/em>want and fear, freedom of <\/em>expression and worship. As opposed to foreign fascism (which represented authoritarianism, censorship, persecution, and economic regimentation), America stood for popular democracy, a free press, civil liberties, and free market economic opportunity for all. So devoted were U.S. citizens to these ideals of freedom\u2014under grave threat by the likes of Hitler and Tojo\u2014that they would fight to the death to preserve them. Never mind that U.S. public opinion was only slowly shifting from its interwar isolationism; that the lingering Great Depression (and entrenched Jim Crow segregation) left serious doubts about economic and political equality in the U.S.; and that Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal itself expanded state power, executive authority, and mass media manipulation in ways that invited comparison, not just contrast, to global fascism from the third-term<\/em> president\u2019s detractors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n By then, most Hollywood studio heads were not <\/em>among those detractors. They were, instead, giving themselves over to the Roosevelt administration\u2019s agenda, especially its growing antifascist international interventionism. In that pivotal year of 1941, it was Gary Cooper\u2014more than any other matinee idol\u2014that was most associated with this shift. He starred in that year\u2019s top-grossing film (by more than double its nearest competitor): Howard Hawks\u2019 Sergeant York, <\/em>released with great ballyhoo during the Fourth of July weekend. In it, Cooper plays famed World War I hero, Alvin C. York, who single-handedly neutralized a German unit in a dramatic battle, but only after converting from his status as conscientious objector. Sergeant York<\/em> focuses on the latter drama, giving us York (Cooper) as a backwoods Tennessean Christian who experiences a revelation (as a surrogate for isolationist holdouts in the audience) that the Bible and <\/em>American History allow for, even insist upon, just <\/em>wars\u2014in order to save lives and preserve freedom from blood-thirsty power-hungry enemies, like the Huns of yesteryear or, more to the point, the Nazis of current-day. Beloved in this role, Cooper won his first Academy Award, easily besting industry outsider Orson Welles, nominated for his role in a little film called Citizen Kane, <\/em>itself filled to its cornucopian brim with the emergent antifascist zeitgeist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like Citizen Kane<\/em>, and unlike most of Hollywood\u2019s flood of wartime antifascist films, Meet John Doe<\/em>\u2014Cooper\u2019s other film of 1941\u2014is concerned with fascism as a domestic <\/em>threat, not just an international one. (The other major entry in this category is Keeper of the Flame <\/em>[1942].) Also like Citizen Kane<\/em>, Meet John Doe <\/em>is the product of a screenwriter and director collaboration in which the director hogged the credit, though Capra\u2019s partner, Robert Riskin, took it better than Welles,\u2019 Herman Mankiewicz, whose dispute with Welles is the source of enduring debates in film studies (see auteur <\/em>theory) and recent resuscitation in Mank<\/em><\/a>. Riskin collaborated with Capra on no less than eleven films, including It Happened One Night <\/em>(1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, <\/em>and You Can\u2019t Take It With You<\/em> (1938), for which he received one Oscar to the director\u2019s four, and mostly accepted his relative anonymity as a matter of course. Still, he had his limits, according to his daughter Victoria Riskin\u2019s biography. \u201cOne day,\u201d she writes, \u201cafter reading one Capra interview too many about the Capra touch, Riskin put 100 pages of blank white paper on Capra\u2019s desk and said, \u2018Here, Frank, put the Capra touch on this.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Whatever its source, the Capra touch\u2014that reassuring sense that the \u2018Little Guy\u2019 and his small-town decency will redeem American ideals from the Fat Cats corrupting it\u2014is plenty evident in Meet John Doe. <\/em>In this case, the Fat Cat in question, D.B. Norton (Edward Arnold, reprising his villainy from You Can\u2019t Take It With You <\/em>and Mr. Smith<\/em>) is not only money-hungry but power-hungry, the film\u2019s would-be fascist. He is linked to European fascists by his motorcycle \u201ctroopers,\u201d his Nazi-esque nephew (Rod La Rocque), his taste towards Riefenstahlian pageantry, and his dialogue: \u201cWhat the American people need is an iron hand!\u201d The films begins with his purchase of a big city newspaper, after which a jackhammer chisels away the words \u201cA free people means a free press.\u201d The fast-talking, (only superficially) cynical gal-reporter Ann Mitchell (Stanwyck, taking on the role perfected by Jean Arthur in Mr. Deeds <\/em>and Mr. Smith<\/em>) saves herself from Norton\u2019s merciless lay-offs by proving she knows how to protect his profits. She cooks up a \u2018fake news\u2019 circulation stunt that involves an anonymous unemployed man who writes in threatening to jump from a tall building in order to protest \u201cthe greed [and] inhumanity\u201d of the Powerful and \u201cthe problems of the average man.\u201d It\u2019s in her search to cast this fabricated \u201cJohn Doe\u201d that Ann finds \u2018Long John\u2019 Willoughby (Cooper) and his wonderful face. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Hungry, a bit dopey, and in need of money to fix his pitching arm, Willoughby agrees to the plan, dragging along his hobo-philosophizing sidekick, the \u201cColonel\u201d (Walter Brennan, whose rapport with Cooper was established in four previous films, including Sergeant York<\/em>).<\/em> Opposed, <\/em>the Colonel speechifies on the entrapping and emasculating effects of money. But Willoughby proves incorruptible; Ann hasn\u2019t discovered a faux-populist but unleashed a real one. He believes the stuff Ann has him say: about \u201cThe People,\u201d about the meek inheriting the Earth, the \u201cteamwork\u201d of America\u2019s \u201clittle punks\u201d as they stomp out the Fat Cats\u2019 \u201cdarkness.\u201d Increasingly, Ann does too; she is convinced by Willoughby, with whom she has fallen in love, that such \u201cplatitudes\u201d really \u201cmean\u201d something. And so do the hundreds of thousands of ordinary folks who form \u201cJohn Doe Clubs\u201d\u2014a movement Norton intends to exploit in his bid for the U.S. presidency. Norton makes Willoughby the headliner at his third-party political convention, swarming with disturbingly adulate followers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For all the folksy sentimentality of the Capra touch, it is important to note that Meet John Doe <\/em>is not as naively optimistic about American Democracy as the \u201cCapra-corny\u201d reputation suggests. As in so many of his other films, we dwell in its corruption at length before we are allowed its redemption. Sometimes the scathing social criticism embedded in the dramatic arc overcomes the hopeful resolution. At the end of Meet John Doe, <\/em>the despairing Willoughby sets out to make good on his suicide threat on Christmas Eve, with the film ramping up its John Doe-as-Christ analogies to full wattage. At the last minute, Ann and \u2018The People\u2019 talk him into living to fight on, a sort of deus ex populi<\/em>\u2014the lameness of which both Capra and Riskin lamented, unable to devise something better. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Along with Norton in the shadows, the film\u2019s warnings linger about the thinness of the line between popular democracy and fascism and, relatedly, about money in politics and the power of Big Media to manipulate a gullible public so easily whipped into a frenzy and inexorably drawn towards charismatic leaders. We would do well to remember: such leaders are as likely to be as selflessly benevolent as Long John Willoughby as they are to be as gorgeous as Gary Cooper\u2014the face of all-American antifascist heroism in 1941.\u00a0 “Meet John Doe” is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/meet-john-doe-1024x711.jpg\")
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