You can read earlier parts here.
AT THE start of this essay, I called Meet John Doe a great Christmas movie. To this point in the story, little has indicated that this is the case. The holiday is only relevant in that it is the day on which John Doe will decide whether his life is worth living.
We are only reminded of the holiday when we see D B Norton standing ruminatively in front of a gigantic, ornately decorated Christmas tree. Carollers sings ‘Silent Night’ outside his window. Having successfully suppressed the man capable of exposing him, he should be happy. ‘Merry Christmas, sir,’ says his butler, offering him a drink. Norton tosses a Christmas tip on the tray and looks anxiously at his watch. Eleven o’clock. An hour before John Doe pledged to jump.
Norton, like Ann and Long John’s friends, knows something that the crowd that turned on him does not. John Willoughby really is a good guy. Though John never had any intention of jumping to his death, the combination of despair and thirst for justice could well make him realise the John Doe of Ann’s imagination. To protect himself from this inconvenience, Norton heads to City Hall with his powerful friends to prevent this from happening. Ann, with an entirely different motive, has the same idea. Followed by the Colonel and the editor Connell, she madly climbs the fourteen floors of City Hall to its observation deck. Norton and his men arrive first, but there is no sign of John. After waiting ten minutes, the bells ring out for midnight. It is Christmas Day, but still John has not shown up. As Norton and his men make to leave, a figure emerges from the shadows. He drops a letter into the mail chute and moves to the edge. As he lifts his leg over the railing, Norton advises him, ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you, John.’ The ground is covered with policemen who have instructions to remove any signs of John Doe’s suicide.
John is undeterred. Prepared for such an eventuality, he has already mailed a suicide note to Connell. He warns Norton to back off lest he take him down with him. ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ he says. ‘You killed the John Doe movement but now you’re going to see it born all over again.’
This scene, the dramatic climax of the movie, is very difficult to read. On one hand, it displays the courage of John, who has arisen from a state of incapacitation to that of an avenging angel. Despite his precautions, Norton is clearly afraid of what John is about to do. None of his money and influence can prevent John from going over the edge, and potentially taking Norton’s reputation with him. As John understands it, this would be a simple triumph for good over evil. Even if he were to die, the John Doe Movement would continue in existence. That John should taunt Norton with this fact reveals just how evil he takes him to be. How could anybody but a sinister man feel threatened by a movement committed to fraternal love, forgiveness, and a commitment to resolve social discord outside of politics?
At the same time, John is about to perform an intrinsically evil act. Just how evil was never so apparent as at this moment in the film. Until this point, John’s suicide was a mere fiction, something he never conceived of performing. Consequently, the viewer never had to contemplate its ramifications. Now, however, the act’s ugliness is revealed. John may think he is performing a brave act of self-sacrifice, but Norton is likely correct: his suicide will do little to promote his cause. ‘You will be buried in Potter’s Field and you will have accomplished nothing.’ Worse, John would cause great harm to his friends who care for him deeply. Nobody wants John to die. It is hard not to conclude that his planned suicide is a desperate attempt to save himself from public contempt and prove that his life has value.
It is no wonder that Frank Capra had difficulty resolving the movie. He tried out four different endings to various audiences, none satisfying him or his screenwriter, Robert Riskin. Apparently, Capra and Riskin began the movie without knowing precisely how it would end. Capra, an inveterate optimist, reassured his fretting partner that the picture would ‘dictate its own ending’. It didn’t. Capra called the first seven-eighths of Meet John Doe ‘The Great American Motion Picture’ but the last eighth the ‘The Great American Letdown.’ (The Name Above the Title, p. 304.) The critics who saw the movie in its early form largely agreed, though still rating it very highly, indeed higher than any of Capra’s other films to this point.
As one might expect for a movie of the golden age of Hollywood, John’s salvation is effected, at least partly, by the love of a woman. As he motions towards the railing, Ann calls out his name, rushing towards him in a desperate attempt to rescue him. She begs him to change his mind, claiming that he need not kill himself to keep the John Doe Clubs alive. ‘If it’s worth dying for it’s worth living for.’ She promises that they can start over, just the two of them, only doing it clean and honest this time. ‘If you die, I want to die too.’ Before fainting in his arms, she confesses her love for him. Not for John Doe, the dramatis persona, but for Long John Willoughby, the washed-up ballplayer.
To a lesser director and storyteller, this ending might have been satisfactory. Capra knew otherwise. By itself, Ann’s love is insufficient to save John; much more than heartache for her has led him to contemplate suicide. Not only must Ann express her love for him but she must also instruct him. As the Christmas bells ring in the background, Ann exhorts him. ‘You want to be honest, don’t you? Well, you don’t have to die to keep the John Doe ideal alive. Someone already died for that once. The first John Doe. And he’s kept that idea alive for nearly two thousand years . . . And he’ll go on keeping it alive, for ever and always. For every John Doe movement these men kill a new one will be born.’
With religious fervour, Ann pleads with John not to give up. He would be betraying the very cause that he professes to support. His sacrifice would not only be unnecessary but a foolish sacrilege. Whether John lives or dies, the original John Doe Club, that fraternal order of love and forgiveness which sprouted in Bethlehem, which disdains earthly princes for a transcendental principle, will continue to exist. The Kingdom of God has already been announced, with the price already paid, once and for all. In his madness, John must be reminded of this. ‘That’s why those bells are ringing, John,’ says Ann with hope in her voice.
Stirring as these words are, I don’t think they are enough to turn John’s heart. Why? Well, by themselves they are just words. Not only that, they are spoken by a woman in love, who might say anything to save her beloved. Were John merely pining for the love of Ann, perhaps they would be enough to save him. But, as we have discovered over the course of the movie, John has a noble soul. He really is committed to the idea of the John Doe movement and has come to believe that he plays a special role in its continuance. Consequently, we should not be surprised if even this reasoned account did not persuade him.
Capra could have ended the film here, with John backing away from the railing accompanied by the woman who saved him. Had he done so, the viewer would be left with a beautiful speech, expressed so memorably by the talented Stanwyck, and the comforting idea that love had rescued both John and the John Doe Clubs all at once. I don’t know if this is one of the four separate endings that Capra tried out. I suspect that it was. I also suspect that Capra knew, rightly, that his audience wouldn’t buy it. After the epic standoff between Long John Willoughby and D B Norton on the vertiginous observatory of City Hall, a biblical confrontation between the Meek and the Powers of the Earth, something more than the sermonising of a lovesick woman was needed.
To be continued
