Meet John Doe

A 1941 film by Frank Capra with Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper. Stanwyck is a reporter about to get laid off when she invents a voice for the pre-war everyman (John Doe) who threatens to leap from City Hall on Christmas Eve to protest corruption in local politics. His fictious letter strikes a chord and Babs conspires with her editor to cast a rube to play the part and string the story along. Cooper is a down-on-his-luck broken down pitcher too naive to realize the consequences of going along for this ride. The paper's publisher takes an interest in this folk hero and promotes him until he is a national phenomenon. The publisher, however, has nefarious motivations for doing this. There are a number of extremely long speeches in this film. The kind you just don't see anymore. People tell stories about off-screen action (again something that you rarely see). There's also a lot of very pedantic political pushing in there. It's an interesting movie as a kind of look back in time. After the film Robert Osbourne explained that Capra filmed five different endings which screened in different parts of the country until they settled on "the ending". I would like to see the others because this version was a happy ending where he gets the girl, doesn't kill himself and triumphs over evil.