MOVIES : COMMENTARY : John Doe, Meet Ross Perot : Five decades later, Frank Capra’s ‘Meet John Doe’ eerily resembles today’s political scene--although Gary Cooper was taller

Virtually overnight he becomes a major political force. One day he is unknown to most Americans, then a network appearance brings his simple, no-nonsense views into homes all over the country and he is a national obsession. His picture is on the cover of Time magazine, a massive grass-roots movement forms across the United States, leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties are scrambling to derail what might become a runaway third-party presidential campaign.

No, not him. Him! John Doe, the reluctant hero of Frank Capra’s classic 1941 film “Meet John Doe,” whose depiction of a nation ready to reject traditional party candidates and send a political amateur to the White House bears an eerie resemblance, 51 years later, to the saga of Ross Perot.

It’s not that John Doe and Ross Perot are alike in any way. Doe is a homeless rube lured into a media stunt financed by an unscrupulous billionaire; Perot is no one’s fool and his own billionaire. But the similarities between the political scene in the movie and in the 1992 presidential picture are close enough that anyone bewildered by the sudden threat of a third-party presidency might find “Meet John Doe” worth a look.

The picture, written by longtime Capra collaborator Robert Riskin, tells the story of John Willoughby, a lanky nonpolitical drifter who agrees--for the price of having his pitching arm repaired--to portray John Doe, the “disgusted American citizen” threatening to kill himself in a letter made up by newspaper columnist Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck). In the letter, John Doe says he’s been out of work for four years and plans to jump off the roof of City Hall on Christmas Eve as a protest to “the slimy politics” responsible for his and the nation’s predicament.

The letter touches a nerve among the paper’s readers, and the columnist persuades her editor to keep John Doe alive as a circulation builder. When the stunt turns into a national political movement, the paper’s owner--an oil baron and media mogul--concocts a plan to create a third political party and get himself elected President on a coalition of votes delivered by the John Doe Clubs and business and labor leaders already in his pocket.

The scheme fails when John Willoughby starts believing his own ghost-written speeches and refuses to betray his supporters.

“Meet John Doe” doesn’t contain any prescient political solutions to today’s problems, and Capra and Riskin planted enough love-thy-neighbor corn in it to put both Oral Roberts and Orville Redenbacher out of business. But the parallels between the social conditions then and now, and of the mood of electorates a half-century apart, suggest that anyone who makes a case for change from outside the two-party system right now might become the lightning rod for a new political mandate.

John Doe is a protest hero whose attack is party blind and passionately simple. He’s against everything that the two-party system tends to breed--legislative gridlock, political self-interest and cronyism, inefficient bureaucracy, and depersonalized representation. In his daily newspaper column, titled “I Protest,” John Doe rails against problems that could be ripped from TODAY’S headlines. The “collapse of decency in the world,” “corruption in local politics,” “state relief being used as a political football,” “county hospitals shutting out the needy.”

America’s a mess. Greed, fear, prejudice and brutality reign, and John Doe, with a “We can overcome” pitch that specifically EXCLUDES politicians (they’re not even allowed to join the burgeoning John Doe Clubs) rounds them all up and attributes them to the sins and omissions of faceless government and unresponsive leaders.

The war in Europe and another brewing in the Pacific would end the economic slump that informed stories like “Meet John Doe” and dozens of other Depression Era movies. But as we can see now, World War II didn’t really solve the big social problems; it merely put them in remission for half a century while a majority of Americans enjoyed economic health.

What “Meet John Doe” demonstrates better than anything is how quickly, in the era of instant communication, a disenchanted public can be rallied to a cause in which they believe their energy and voices can make a difference.

“I know what a lot of you are saying,” says Willoughby, in the radio broadcast that launches the John Doe Movement. “‘What can I do? I’m just a little punk. I don’t count.’ Well, you’re dead wrong! The little punks have always counted because in the long run the character of a country is the sum total of the character of its little punks.”

Throughout the movie, John Doe’s main theme is that free people can “beat the world at anything, from war to tiddlywinks, if we all pull in the same direction.” It’s a common-sense ethic that’s probably been around since man tried to roll that first stone wheel uphill, and took the form of an anguished cry--”Can we all get along?”--from Rodney King during the Los Angeles riots.

In a flash, the John Doe movement is nationwide; there are 2,400 clubs, 20 million members, and a platform of principles that’s about as easy to attack as the 10 Commandments. The polls may not be sophisticated, but the party bosses can sense a groundswell when it’s about to bury them. And as the movement gains hurricane strength, we see officials at Democratic and Republican headquarters, and legislators in smoke-filled rooms, hunkered down trying--as their 1992 counterparts are now--to understand what’s happening.

Who is John Doe? What does he want? How do we stop him?

What the John Doe movement wants is never defined much beyond a return of human dignity (jobs) and a feeling of brotherhood (social stability), the obvious things that existing leaders are unable or unwilling to deliver.

“John, what we’re handing them are platitudes, things they’ve heard a million times,” Ann Mitchell says when she sees that revolutionary sparkle growing in his eyes.

“Yeah, I’ve heard them a million times, too,” he says. “Maybe they’re just like me, just beginning to get an idea what those things mean.”

John Doe has no new strategies to offer, but he is at least focused on the issues consuming the working class, and his sudden visibility as an outsider with power gives them a rallying point. That they know little about him, and less about his ability to lead them is beside the point. Faced with a choice between the status quo and an untried outsider, many of them figure they have nothing to lose.

The key moment in the John Doe movement comes when the columnist’s mother advises her to abandon the protest theme and focus on the future. “People are tired of hearing nothing but doom and despair on the radio,” Mrs. Mitchell says. “Why don’t you let him say something simple and real, something with hope in it?”

So Ann digs into the diary of her late father, an idealist and humanitarian, and a kinder, gentler John Doe is born. There’ll be no Willie Horton ads from this camp.

In his first national radio address, John Doe implores people to start making the world a better place by turning to their neighbors. “If he’s sick, call on him! If he’s hungry, feed him! If he’s out of a job, find him one. . . . Tear down the fence that separates you . . . and you’ll tear down a lot of hates and prejudices!”

“If you tore one picket off of your neighbor’s fence, he’d sue you,” says Willoughby’s best friend (Walter Brennan), a career hobo who has written the entire system off to corrupting materialism. He may have the best sense of human nature of anyone in the story, but he also underestimates the evangelical tug of words being spoken into ears that want to hear them.

Soon, Willoughby is listening to a small-town soda jerk (Regis Toomey) explain how putting John Doe neighborliness to work helped unite his entire community. How a man thought to be a sourpuss turned out to be a nice old guy who simply can’t hear well, how an old couple thought to be rich are really impoverished and how a neighborhood “no-account” named Grubbell eats out of garbage cans because he is too proud to take charity.

“Well, sir,” the clerk says, “about a dozen families got together and gave Grubbell a job watering their lawns . . . and then we found jobs for six other people and they’ve gone off relief.”

Get people working, get them off relief--is this a plan for the ‘90s or what! The best line in the movie comes from a welfare administrator who, with the John Doe hire-a-neighbor program in full bloom, says, “If this keeps up, I’ll be out of a job.”

That’s about as close to a specific political notion that the movie gets, however. The surface politics of John Doe are neither left nor right, more anti-politician than anti-government. They are cut to suit what Cornell University political science professor Theodore J. Lowi identifies in today’s political mix as “the radicalized middle,” moderates who believe the two-party system no longer produces effective government.

The John Doe platform is simple democratic humanism, which sees both easy handouts and covetous hoarding--the defining principles of liberals and conservatives in many people’s minds--as unacceptable.

Critics have attributed the ambiguous politics of “Meet John Doe” to the fact that Capra was a closet conservative, a Sicilian immigrant for whom the American Dream had already kicked in. In his new biography, “Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success,” author Joe McBride suggests that Capra had a John Doe complex himself, that he “lived with anxiety about what would happen if the public came to realize that he was not the man they thought he was.”

Film critic Andrew Sarris has called the character John Doe a “barefoot fascist” who is more interested in the conformity of the common man than in any true political reform and said that with “Meet John Doe,” Capra “crossed the thin line between populist sentimentality and populist demagoguery.”

Another critic, David Thomson, said the most odious aspect of Capra’s Depression Era political movies is “the way they bowdlerize politics by suggesting that the tide of corruption can be turned by one hero.” That’s certainly the way things turn out in Capra’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” but not in “Meet John Doe.” The movie merely suggests that when they’re desperate enough, people want to believe one person can turn everything around.

That is where the John Doe and Ross Perot stories line up perfectly. Whatever Perot would do as President, his outsider status and his apparent middle-of-the-road politics have cast him as the lone hero for a large segment of a restless electorate, and we’ll just have to see what he does with it.

John Doe, of course, is a duped fraud who comes to realize that the thing he touches is real. When D.B. Norton threatens to destroy both John Doe and the movement, the wizened Willoughby says, “Go ahead and try. You couldn’t do it in a million years . . . because (this thing’s) bigger than whether I’m a fake.”

In a preview version of “Meet John Doe,” Willoughby returns on Christmas Eve and makes good on the suicide threat he inherited, thereby refiring the furnace under the John Doe movement. But the audience found that ending too bleak (kill Gary Cooper?), so the movie ends instead with an orgy of hopeful last-second idealism, reminding us that the public will is indestructible.

“For every John Doe movement these men kill,” says the totally reformed Ann Mitchell, “a new one will be born!”

And so one has, in the form of Perot-mania. If the economy had gotten this bad a few years earlier, it might have been Iacocca-mania, and in a few years, if it doesn’t get any better, it could be Ueberroth-mania. The John Doe vote may be hard to wrest from third-party candidates now that people understand its power.

“Meet John Doe” couldn’t be made in Hollywood today, and would go directly to video if someone tried. Its politics are too simplistic, too vague and too naive for serious drama in the post-Watergate era, and its subject matter--the manipulation of desperate people through the mass media--cuts too close to the bone right now for anything but the darkest kind of comedy.

But in its depiction of a political scene that looks like the blueprint to 1992, “Meet John Doe” is more contemporary than any movie to come out of Hollywood in a long time, and it leaves a message that politicians in both parties might think about:

The disaffection that it takes for an electorate to turn a complete outsider into an overnight political force is bigger than whether he’s a fake.