Programme notes CH 04 — The Matinee
Meet John Doe
A newspaper invents a man, then has to hire someone to be him.
A columnist about to be laid off invents a reader who will jump from City Hall on Christmas Eve, and when the letters pour in the paper needs a face. Gary Cooper, a bush-league pitcher with a dead arm, takes the part for a square meal and a doctor. Capra plays the first hour as screwball and the second as a warning: a slogan becomes a movement, and the movement becomes somebody’s property. Stanwyck writes his speeches out of her late father’s diary — watch her at the first radio broadcast, hearing her own lie come back as something true. The snow on the roof at the end is still arguing with itself.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Frank Capra
- Photographed by
- George Barnes
- With
- Paul Panzer · Gary Cooper · Barbara Stanwyck · Walter Brennan · Susan Peters · Spring Byington
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Two newsrooms a year apart, both running on a story that is not quite true. Hawks plays the manufactured scoop for speed and lets nobody pay for it; Capra follows his until it fills a ballpark in the rain, and then sends the bill.