Pre-Code Parade: THE WASHINGTON MASQUERADE (1932)

Frank Capra married his "Cinderella man" concept to the subject of American politics in 1939's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. By that time Charles Brabin had Capra beat by seven years. Adapting Henry Bernstein's play The Claw, Brabin and five writers (including the late actor Louis Wolheim, who had worked on a treatment before dying the previous year) put their not-quite-so-innocent Cinderella Man -- this is the Pre-Code era, after all through a similar rise, fall and redemption routine, with twists specific to the star. Lionel Barrymore's junior senator even has the same first name as Jimmy Stewart's iconic neophyte. He is Jeff (for Jefferson) Keane, a small-town lawyer who makes a name for himself in statewide politics by getting the governor to pardon a man wrongly convicted of murder. He's encouraged to challenge the judge who sentenced the poor man in the next election, but doing so would put him at odds with the state's powerful political boss, U.S. Senator Bitler (Burton Churchill). Bitler tries to intimidate and humiliate Keane into submission at a swanky party crashed by the lawyer, but the boss only provokes our hero into challenging him instead of the judge. Despite the odds, and by means of no interest to the filmmakers, Keane pulls off the upset and heads to Washington D.C. with his daughter (Diane Sinclair) in tow to serve as his hostess, the Senator-elect being a widower. He takes the oath despite being denied the courtesy of an escort by his senior colleague from his home state, who considers Keane a traitor to their party. To this point, Washington Masquerade is so Capra-esque that Keane is ready to throw punches at his fellow Senator.

Keane's big issue in the election was hydroelectric power. Like many Americans in the first third of the 20th century, he believes in federal or municipal ownership. Needless to say, the idea was widely opposed by pro-business types, one of whom denounces the concept as "Communistic" on the Senate floor, provoking Keane's maiden speech in the august body. To those who think private enterprise is best qualified to steward the nation's resources, Keane offers the Depression as evidence to the contrary -- a palpable hit, certainly, for many in the movie audience. Keane's speech is a hit with the public in the picture as well, forcing powerful lobbyists to take steps to stop him. Senator Jeff is double-teamed by lawyer Alan Hinsdale (the ever-loathsome C. Henry Gordon) and influential D.C. courtesan Consuela Fairbanks (Karen Morley). She seduces Jeff the old fashioned way, while Hinsdale seduces him with wealth. Consuela marries the lonely widower (over his daughter's warnings) and pressures him toward a business relationship with Hinsdale that has the appearance of corruption. Complicating the scheme is Consuela's old lover Henri Brenner (Nils "General Yen" Asther), with whom she renews an affair. When everything falls apart, it looks like old Jeff Keane will take the fall for taking bribes from Hinsdale, but he gets one chance to speak in his own defense and makes the most of it. Unlike Jeff Smith, who after all was framed, Keane admits guilt in order to blow the whistle on those also guilty -- not just Hinsdale but former Boss Bitler.

Then the film goes too far. For Capra, it would be enough for Jeff Smith to work himself into a swoon. That's not enough for Lionel Barrymore, however. He'd just won an Academy Award playing an attorney who talks himself to death in court in A Free Soul and, by God, he's going to talk himself to death in this picture, too! This time Barrymore does the old, "I'm just going to sit very still in this chair until people notice that I'm dead" trick. For that he earns an epitaph from an admirer: "He loved his country enough to die for it." The line lands like a lead weight. The problem is, the stunt Barrymore pulled in Free Soul is like Daffy Duck's gasoline trick in the cartoon; the people may want an encore but you can only do it once. It's hard to imagine any moviegoer, even the simplest rube, who saw Washington Masquerade after A Free Soul without saying, "Again?" It's a you've-got-to-be-kidding moment that kills the picture dead, at least. Too bad, too, because the picture has points of interest apart from being a precursor of Capra's film. Moviegoers in the Pre-Code period seemed to want pictures to explain what was wrong with Washington, unlike their descendants eighty years later. A cycle of political pictures resulted that document the range of options people imagined possible in the 1930s. While Washington Masquerade is neither the most incisive nor the wildest of these, like all these pictures it has obvious historical interest, and for those who find historical interest itself entertaining, I recommend it.

Pre-Code Parade: WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND (1932)

Here's a Columbia picture that seems like it should have been one of studio ace director Frank Capra's films. Capra might have thought so himself, since some of the ideas in James Cruze's picture reappear in Capra's later classics. Cruze directed a screenplay by frequent Capra collaborator Jo Swerling, who worked from a story by playwright Maxwell Anderson, who was inspired by an initially anonymous expose of shady politics in Washington D.C. that evolved into the newspaper column begun by Drew Pearson and continued by Jack Anderson. In many ways the final product looks and feels like a rough draft for a Capra film, but Washington Merry-Go-Round has one of the most stunning moments in Pre-Code cinema, without bare flesh or bullets fired. Freshman congressman Button Gwinett Brown (Lee Tracy) is making his first tour of the nation's capital and taking in a parade of the Bonus Army, the gathering of World War I veterans who demanded an early payment (out of Depression necessity) of the bonuses the government had promised to pay them in 1945, and who were eventually driven out of Washington by tanks at the command of General Douglas MacArthur. Brown, a direct descendant of the Button Gwinett who signed the Declaration of Independence, recognizes an army buddy among the marchers who takes him to see "Bonusville," the veterans' encampment. It's a sad sight and drives Brown to drink a little. His buddy urges him to see some more veterans but Brown tries to beg off. Finally, he makes a little speech -- and turns on them viciously. He reveals his own plan to double-cross his political sponsors by exposing their corruption, then denounces the Bonus Army for being no more than a bunch of panhandlers, more concerned with getting theirs than with helping save the country from the "invisible government" that Brown blames for the nation's plight. More than eighty years later, we've been taught to see the bonus marchers as heroes and victims, and some of them will play a more positive role -- sort of -- later in the picture. But according to Brown -- hence according to Cruze, Swerling, Anderson et al? -- they're part of the problem. In another setting, he complains: everyone comes to Washington to get something, but no one comes to give anything. In Bonusville, he's mobbed out of the camp.

What are we supposed to make of Button Gwinett Brown? Embodied by Lee Tracy, he might look like a con man in his own right at first glance. His first scenes are purely comical. His prized possession is an autographed letter from his ancestor, whose signature is the rarest and hence most valuable of all the Declaration's signers. His servant Clarence (Muse, of course) has been allowed to show the letter, valued at $50,000, to a skeptical Pullman porter. In that moment of vindication, a gust of wind on board their train blows the letter out of Clarence's hands. He, Brown and the porter chase after it until it slips under the door into the compartment of Alice Wylie (Constance Cummings), a U.S. Senator's daughter. She mistakes it for trash and tears it up. Informed of her error by Brown, she joins him on the floor gathering up the fragments, both their heads under her bed when her mother enters the compartment. Scandal! We might think we've been introduced to a buffoon, and for much of the picture there's a certain uncertainty about Brown's self-righteousness. He believes in what he's doing, but tends to waste his energy in oratory, including an outburst at the Library of Congress, while regarding the originals of the Declaration and Constitution, that earns unexpected applause from tourists. He wastes his rhetorical firepower on small-time issues, making a laughingstock of himself by taking an epic stand against a $2,000,000 memorial to a Indian-robbing villain of a general. He needs to learn how to advance his agenda pragmatically, find allies, etc. -- but he never gets the chance. Too quick to declare war on the film's villain, a lobbyist-bootlegger who envisions himself a peer of Mussolini and Stalin (Hitler hasn't yet taken power), Brown soon loses his job when the villain arranges for a recount in Brown's district (after his inauguration!) and arranges for Brown to lose. The power of the system is proven again, but it only means that Brown has nothing left to lose, yet plenty to do....

In its final act Washington Merry-Go-Round morphs from often-effective satire to one of the first films in the brief cycle of vigilantism that some viewers ever since have seen as vaguely fascistic. After the villain proves himself irredeemably evil by having old Senator Wylie, Alice's father (Walter Connolly) poisoned, Brown takes decisive action. He's returned to Bonusville, where his buddy has rallied a cohort of dependable men who've seen the justice of Brown's views. They now form Brown's army, taking jobs to spy on the villain and his minions before joining him to stop the villain's car on a lonely road. Brown confronts him with incontestable evidence of his evildoing, but offers him suicide as an easy way out. The film ends with a gunshot in a tent and Brown consoling Alice, his own future uncertain. It's the last of the movie's wild shifts in tone -- it becomes less comical once Muse disappears from the story for no apparent reason, and if the intent was to be critical of Brown's overbearing manner, the ending seems to endorse his uncompromising, ultimately ruthless approach. From satire the film veers into outright fantasy without ever truly cohering due to the chaos at its center. Swerling and Tracy's conception of B. G. Brown might have served Capra as a textbook of what not to do with his own heroes. Capra may have gone too far in making his heroes naive, but it worked better dramatically for his Cinderella-Man heroes to suffer potentially demoralizing learning experiences and grow wiser through endurance than for Brown to arrive in Washington with a master plan in place, already convinced that he's more clever than anyone. That only left me wishing we had seen his campaign and how he must have swallowed his pride while spouting the party line in order to get his big chance in Washington. There's no real learning experience for Brown; adversity only prods him into doubling down and trading constitutionalism for virtual lynch law. The most that can be said for him is that he seems to have been an authentic expression of the confusion and anger of his moment in history.

Washington Merry-Go-Round is an authentically angry and confused film with a few brilliant moments. One of those is Brown and Clarence's arrival in Washington, a busily choreographed sequence involving a convention of Prohibition supporters (the availability of "embassy stuff," i.e. diplomatic liquor, is a running gag), a bunch of Boy Scouts ("Are we gonna see the President?"), a camera-hog fellow congressman, and a lobbyist hired in advance as Brown's secretary but fired by Brown on the spot. The movie may be at its best in such moments of observational humor, but Tracy's vocal firepower is a force not to be denied. Overall it's too inconsistent in tone to be a classic, but it's exactly that anger and confusion that make it an indispensable cinematic document of the era.

On the Big Screen: NO (2012)

The Chilean director Pablo Larrain has made a loose trilogy of films dealing with his country's years under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Without having seen the middle film, 2010's Post Mortem, I'd suggest tentatively that the role of the media in Chile is an important subject of the series. The first film, Tony Manero, dealt with a man obsessed with Saturday Night Fever and getting on television. The latest, No, is a handheld epic about the 1988 referendum that marked the end of the Pinochet era, filmed in a deliberately ratty style as if it were a compilation of home movies (or video) of the time. The style seems appropriate for a film concerned with the power of television. Despite the particular place and time of the story, No has a strong thematic (if not ideological) resemblance to another 2012 release, Steven Spielberg's Lincoln. The films have in common a mildly Machiavellian attitude toward politics that has offended some idealistic observers. As American audiences know, Lincoln focused on the shady means justified by the morally indisputable end of abolishing slavery in the U.S. Spielberg and Tony Kushner's moral could be summed up as: we don't have to convince you that we're right; we just need your votes. No arguably boils down to the same argument. Its protagonist is Raul Saavedra (Gael Garcia Bernal), a onetime exile -- his father was politically active -- working in the advertising business as the story opens. He produces TV commercials and is approached by the Chilean opposition to consult their upcoming ad campaign. In response to international pressure, the Pinochet government has called a plebiscite to determine whether the general will stay in power. Many in the opposition are skeptical, assuming that the government will rig the results, but many also want to take advantage of the opportunity created by the allotment of 15 minutes of air time each night during the run-up to the vote. Since few expect to win (or be allowed to win) the vote, they want to use their nightly spots as a consciousness-raising exercise. They carry understandable grudges against the regime for its persecution of the left and dissidents in general. They think that calling people's attention to Pinochet's crimes is the most important thing. But Raul has a more radical idea: why not play to win?

The plebiscite is a simple yes-or-no vote, and Raul's idea is to make "No" an attractive product. His innovation is to bring the same techniques to political advertising he applies to commercial advertising. As a result, the No programs look much like the colorful, upbeat and utterly banal montage Raul put together as a soda commercial (the brand name is "Free") at the start of the picture. While the full-time politicians want to speak truth to power or lay the groundwork for a more comprehensive revolution, Raul insists on sticking with the core idea: No = Happiness. "Happiness is Coming" is the No slogan, illustrated with peppy music videos and skits, interlarded with the occasional pointed reminders of Pinochet's tyranny. Like something out of classic Hollywood, the No campaign catches on and the opposition now has a real chance to win. The regime goes on the defensive as Raul's boss from the ad agency turns the Si campaign from the original all-hail-great-leader extravaganza to response-attack ads against the No campaign. Meanwhile, the regime can't restrain itself from thuggery and starts an intimidation campaign against Raul, breaking into his house, defacing his car and threatening his son -- the mother, Raul's estranged wife, is an activist who's already taken some knocks herself. There's a nice irony to the story as Raul feels some pain of his own during the campaign after disparaging his clients' desire to vent their pain and rage in the No spots. And there's a healthy ambivalent note at the end when he finds himself unable to share fully in the opposition's joy when, against the odds, No wins the plebiscite. For Raul, it seems, the biggest consequence of his political intervention is how good it'll look on his résumé.

While Larrain and writer Pedro Peirano, adapting a play, clearly worked independently of Spielberg and Kushner, No and Lincoln are both concerned with the arts of persuasion in a democracy. The American film was clearly pushing against an allegedly idealist mentality that too often found itself out of options if it couldn't change the minds of opponents. The Chilean film, to me, seems less convinced of the correctness of its protagonist's approach than Lincoln is. The Spielberg film is a more triumphant vindication of cunning tactics while No is a constant struggle between the opposition's idealism and commitment to truth and Raul's seemingly-cynical approach; some downbeat material makes it into the programs over Raul's objections. There's a slight thematic echo of Tony Manero in Raul's determination to turn a historic moment into an ad campaign, to remake the world in the image of his cola commercial, even if in a good cause. And there's too much attention to Raul's lingering alienation -- like an overgrown child, he commutes by skateboard in tracking shots that belie the primitivist art direction -- for us to see the plebiscite as an unambiguous triumph of his tactics. Of course, like Lincoln, No has been criticized by idealists who prefer to see politics as the triumph of Ideas, or of The People, rather than a game of manipulating people, and the Chileans will be better judges of the facts that I can be. Neither film is as simplistic as critics portray them, and No is the more subtle, less cheerleading if not otherwise superior film of the two. It's the more interesting film visually because of the efforts by Larrain and cinematographer Sergio Armstrong to recreate 1988 in all its jittery color and the nearly-invisible art direction that makes the illusion work. Bernal isn't a barnstormer like Daniel Day-Lewis in the lead role, but he makes Raul as compellingly complex a character as Day-Lewis's Lincoln -- only Bernal starts from scratch. No and Lincoln really would make a great international double-feature. Each may be a historical film, but their real historical value may be as documents of the dilemmas of liberalism in 2012.

Here's the original No campaign music video as uploaded to YouTube by kntayal.

Gabriel Over the White House: Now Playing, MARCH 29, 1933

Less than one month after the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, media mogul William Randolph Hearst and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio present their fantasy of what a new President ought to do.

Directed by Gregory La Cava, Gabriel Over the White House is one of 1933's most retroactively disturbing pictures and perhaps the year's most overt expression of a widespread longing for strongman government bordering on dictatorship from which most people (including Hearst, who soon turned against FDR) quickly retreated. Reportedly it was too strong even for its time, at least in its original form. Cinema czar Will Hays ordered last-minute cuts of material presumably even more provocative than what we have left. Meanwhile, Hearst heavily promoted this picture, one of his Cosmopolitan productions released in collaboration with  M-G-M. The Hearst-owned Milwaukee Sentinel ran a serial novelization of the story. A rival paper, the Journal, ran this review; the reviewer didn't hold the film's paternity against it.

Gabriel's fantasy has a constraint built in. The film's premise is that only divine intervention can give the country the leadership it needs. Until then, President Judd Hammond (Walter Huston) is little more than a boob, largely indifferent to the nation's pressing problems. He becomes a changed man after miraculously surviving a car wreck, but it's a kind of mixed miracle once it dawns on us that Hammond maybe didn't really survive. Instead, and to justify the title, an aide speculates that the President has been possessed by none other than the Archangel Gabriel, who for some reason has a special interest in the United States. Advertisement and review alike describe the transformed Hammond as "of the people;" in fact he is a virtual dictator, cutting "red tape" like so many Gordian Knots. Such leadership is needed not just to kickstart the economy but to deal with the problem of organized crime. The movie blames immigrants for much of the gangster plague, and in a brutally symbolic scene a number of gang leaders are executed by firing squad at Ellis Island (if I recall right) while numerous others are deported under the gaze of the Statue of Liberty. Despite everything, a belief in limited government still prevails insofar as Hammond, like the dictators of the Roman Republic, has a specific mandate for action. When his mission is accomplished, culminated by the signing of an international peace treaty (after the great powers are brought to the table by a U.S. weapons buildup) the guiding spirit leaves the body and Hammond drops dead. Gabriel is a film impossible to appraise in conventional good-or-bad terms since it is so much a document of its time, more a political than an artistic statement. It's one of 1933's most fascinating cinematic events.

MAIDSTONE (1968-70)

Norman Mailer lived long enough to see his generation's ambitions become irrelevant. As an ambitious American writer after World War II, he grew up in the shadow of Ernest Hemingway, who rose from avant-garde obscurity to become a celebrity while largely retaining his literary reputation. Hemingway was a model and a target for those who would write the Great American Novel, or be the Great American Novelist. Mailer struck early, his war novel The Naked and the Dead making him famous at age 25. For many, he never surpassed that first success, but some credit him for becoming one of the greatest non-fiction writers of the latter 20th century. Beginning with 1959's Advertisements for Myself, Mailer became his own great subject, and in a way he may have written the Great American Novel without realizing it, or maybe without wanting to admit it in the form it took. In Advertisements he promised the G.A.N., but after another decade, despite two more novels, the Great One had not come. Mailer struck out in two directions simultaneously. He published a "non-fiction novel" about his adventures at an antiwar protest, and The Armies of the Night won a Pulitzer Prize. During the same period he became a movie director, but cinema seemed to require a different approach.

Most movies are made as a corporation product. You know, they're planned, and there's a corporation behind them, and they're turned out. Now what we did is, we made a movie as a military operation. When you have a military operation what happens is you set out to take a given town, and your objective is to take that town, and as you go forward all sorts of unforeseen contingencies arrive, and as they do you go around them, or you go through them, or you go under them. But the whole idea is, in a military operation that you get a certain amount of force, moving, and then you move with it, and you discover what the reality of your attack is by attacking. So what we've been doing in the last five days is making an attack on the nature of reality, on what is reality. You can't say that this is real now, what we're doing; you can't say what we were doing last night is real. The only thing you can say is that the reality exists somewhere in the extraordinary tension between the two extremes of the relationship....

You're still thinking of movies that are made when you very carefully structure them, you follow? And you get the maximum out of each moment. But what I'm arguing about in this method is that you can't make a movie that way and get something even remotely resembling the truth. What you can get is, you can get a unilinear abstract of one man's conception of how something might happen. But what I'm saying is that's not the way anything happens. The way anything happens is that it has five different realities at any given moment which then swing around to there, you see?

 

 

Or like this, you follow? And in other words it's sort of a tumbling, odd thing....There's not anyone here, including myself, who finally knows what went on in that movie.

By the standard expressed here Mailer couldn't hope to capture reality in a novel which could only be his own "unilinear abstract." But his operation, as described in a fourth-wall breaking moment near the end of Maidstone, his third feature film, points toward a dead end for modernism at an opposite extreme from art, which to be meaningful must distill experience or "reality" into something comprehensible and ideally vindicated by relevance if not verisimilitude. Mailer's notion of cinema is a recipe for chaos, and Maidstone is a pie in his own face. Something more substantial than a pie, actually.

Mailer apparently conceived Maidstone as a kind of role-playing-game for his cronies, the challenge being whether someone would assassinate Mailer's character, a director turned presidential candidate named Norman T. Kingsley. The author assumes that this Kingsley's candidacy would be taken seriously enough by the power elite that they would contemplate murdering him. We are to understand that Kingsley is an art-house success with a following (of potential voters) in the millions, and a talent comparable to Bunuel, Dreyer, Fellini and Antonioni. The director Norman Mailer isn't the same as the director Kingsley, but from what we see of Kingsley's methods the comparisons are insulting to all of the above. Kingsley's work, which seems to deteriorate from a Bunuel homage to some rather lifeless porn, seems no less amateurish than Mailer's; the latter, it must be said by a fan of the writer, has almost no pictorial sense at all, and at most some aptitude for montage if not narrative. Where there are glimmerings of a visual imagination, Mailer (not Kingsley) seems most influenced by Antonioni in scenes of actors wandering aimlessly through an airy countryside. The wandering may seem Felliniesque, but the space is used more in Antonioni style. But the effect is the opposite of Antonioni's evocation of emptiness, since these excursions feel like idyllic respites from the claustrophobic paranoia chez Kingsley. I'll even give Mailer credit for intending them that way.

Politically, Maidstone is vacuous, its main premise, as far as I can tell, being that Norman Mailer is a legitimate threat to the establishment. Kingsley articulates no political vision, telling a skeptical interviewer only that he has the qualities of character necessary to steer the nation through crises. Mailer sees Kingsley, despite his artistic vocation, as a representative politician, but one guileless enough to allow the contradictions Mailer perceives in all politicians crack the surface -- though while the author sees politicians as potentially part angel, part devil, Kingsley seems mostly devil, a misogynist manipulator who makes an epic ass of himself during an encounter with an ex-wife. With recently-enhanced hindsight, this particular scene, in which actor Mailer scats childishly to some radio music just to fill the air around the estranged couple, reveals Kingsley, if not Mailer, as a real-life Lancaster Dodd, one who we see later admitting that he's made things up as he went along.

 

If Mailer/Kingsley is Lancaster Dodd, than Rip Torn, the professional ringer in the cast, is Maidstone's Freddy Quell. Torn doesn't get many opportunities to act extensively, but he's still obviously in another league than all the hopeless participants improvising without method or conviction. In the story or game, Torn plays Kingsley's disgruntled or disturbed brother, the person most likely to be turned into an assassin. Apparently, any assassination attempt was expected at a party Kingsley stages, and during Mailer's Q&A after the fact a cast member expresses surprise that no one tried anything then. But if the rap session was meant to show that the game was over, Torn didn't get the message. Maidstone closes with an apparently spontaneous surprise attack by Torn, in character, on Mailer, with a hammer. A bloodied Mailer instantly falls out of character and fights Torn, who protests that he has to kill Kingsley, not Mailer. After the men are separated by Mailer's legitimately frightened family, they go on arguing as Mailer denounces Torn's betrayal of his trust. Yet Mailer left the attack in the picture, in lieu of an assassination within the game, and may have inserted the Q&A to set up the new ending as a proof of his method, Torn's attack reshaping the reality of Maidstone as an event rather than a narrative. But the wrap-up is more an admission of defeat, a confession that Maidstone could never be anything more than a documentary about itself, less a commentary about anything than raw material for future commentators on Norman Mailer, who had more literary triumphs to come but only one more film to make, the comparatively conventional adaption of his own detective novel, Tough Guys Don't Dance, in the 1980s. Maidstone remains relevant as long as Mailer does, but no matter how much Mailer fascinates me, his ambitions no longer impress many people, -- who expects novels to imitate life now? -- and despite the welcome arrival of three Mailer films in a Criterion Eclipse box set, those films' time is probably running out. But Maidstone seems worth mentioning on the brink of a presidential election, if only to remind you that there are always other candidates than Row A or Row B on the ballot, and some of them are at least more plausible than Kingsley.

WUSA (1970)

From forty years ago -- forty-one this November -- comes a film that seems more prophetic than historic. Producer Paul Newman brings his Cool Hand Luke director Stuart Rosenberg to helm novelist Robert Stone's adaptation of his A Hall of Mirrors -- I haven't read that novel but what I have read of Stone I've liked a lot. Newman plays a drifter named Reinhardt who drifts into New Orleans, drops into a storefront mission and hears a sermon from Laurence Harvey, who owes him money. Harvey is a doubly evocative presence in the picture, inspiring subtle memories first of Walk on the Wild Side, and later of The Manchurian Candidate. After getting some but not all of what Harvey owes him, Reinhardt crosses paths with Geraldine (Joanne Woodward), an erstwhile ex-prostitute with a scar across one cheek as a stigmatic badge of independence. I'd just seen a precocious Woodward eat poor Van Heflin alive with an over-the-top tomboy performance in George Sherman's Count Three and Pray so I was worried when she started working an accent, but she was better behaved overall. The husband may have been a positive influence. Anyway, Reinhardt takes Geraldine in and finds work as an announcer at the title radio station, where he auditions for Robert (Count Yorga) Quarry. It was gratifying to see Quarry in a civilian role, small though it proved, and to see him craft a completely different personality, neurotic and eventually somewhat paranoid, from his masterful swinging vampire. WUSA is a conservative station -- it services "America's America" -- but it seems to restrict its messages to the breaks between songs and commercials. Reinhardt doesn't believe a word of what he reads over the air but it's a living. His rise is intercut with the descent of well-intentioned social worker Rainey (Anthony Perkins), who grows suspicious that the survey he's working on isn't telling the real story of black poverty, and that the local boss Clotho (Moses Gunn) who facilitates the work is keeping something from him. Rainey and Reinhardt live in the same apartment building along with some hippies in a band, and when Rainey learns that Clotho is conspiring with political candidate Minter (Wayne Rogers), a WUSA personality, to paint a fraudulent portrait of "welfare chiseling" in order to create a campaign issue, he tries to pump Reinhardt for inside dirt on the agenda of station owner Bingamon (Pat Hingle). Reinhardt couldn't care less about the political agenda, but saves his rage for Rainey, whom he calls a "cornpone Christ" and regards as a contemptible idealist and, worse, a whiner. "I hate whiners!" Reinhardt declares, setting the tone for generations of lower-class right-wingers whose only way to salvage self-esteem is to embrace the values of their masters and despise all who protest rather than simply look out for number one.

The storylines converge at a political rally with Reinhardt as MC, Harvey's huckster missionary giving the benediction, "White Power" signs in the audience, a black mob growing restless outside, and Rainey lurking on the catwalk with a gun. Everything ends in disaster: Rainey's shot goes wide and takes out a more-or-less innocent man; Reinhardt tries to calm the crowd but can't stop himself from giving an absurdly contemptuous and career-killing speech ("In the heart of every bomb is a fat old lady going to the fair" or something along those lines); Reinhardt's hippie band pals, whom he'd brainlessly brought along to perform to a hostile audience, panic and plant their stash of pot on Geraldine, who's caught with the stuff and told to expect 15 years in jail given her record, though a one-way escape route lays open for her. Reinhardt and his fellow hustler, the preacher, escape more or less unscathed, the preacher to leave town immediately, Reinhardt to learn from a crippled neighbor (Cloris Leachman) of Geraldine's fate, which inspires perhaps a moment of reflection and a reprise of Neil Diamond's original song for the picture before the drifter goes back to drifting.

WUSA boasts a strong ensemble, weakened but slightly by Perkins's stock twitchy turn, and capped by the liberal entrepreneur Newman's apparently knowing portrait of the enemy mindset. If the movie seems ahead of its time now it may be because we see more Reinhardts than ever around us -- people who are not fanatics but are incapable of solidarity because of their overwhelming contempt for their fellow humans, and perhaps for themselves. I make no pictorial judgments on direction or cinematography because the Flix channel broadcast was pan-and-scan except for the credits, but the location shoot is nevertheless a snapshot of a time and place where history took a wrong turn. It's a film worth watching for both its cinematic and historical interest, and it definitely gets me wanting to read A Hall of Mirrors. In many ways Rosenberg's film, which seems to have flopped in 1970, is an instant period piece, but it's not hard to see today in it, in a chilling way.

On the Small Screen: TOO BIG TO FAIL (2011)

At the heart, almost at the literal center of Curtis Hanson's ensemble-piece history play for HBO is a piece of exposition that renders much of Hanson's talking-head, men-in-crisis drama redundant. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (William Hurt) and his staff sit down and spell out exactly what led to the mortgage crisis of 2008 to help their media rep prepare a briefing for the media. Their account may not convince everyone -- it probably places too much blame on greedy bankers and not enough on government social-engineering to please some ideologues -- but it left me feeling that the process they described, the commodification of mortgages; the growing pressure from banks themselves to lend to less capable borrowers so that mortgages could be bundled and sold elsewhere; the meteoric rise of credit default swaps and an industry of default insurance that exposed firms to risks they refused to imagine -- was what should have been dramatized rather than the labors of bureaucrats to bail out the banks. We can't really appreciate how precipitate the fall was unless we've seen the rise, but Hanson opens in mid-fall, with Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers (James Woods) struggling to survive while denying the scope of the crisis. Too Big To Fail would have been better off with a scene -- made up if necessary -- showing Fuld and his fellow bankers in their glory before the fall and introducing as many of our other cast members as could plausibly fit. Throughout, Hanson's film gives proof that his writers, perhaps intimidated by their proximity to historic events, haven't made enough effort to dramatize the story. The events are dramatic enough to keep the movie moving fairly smartly, but its scope always seems a little off. If Paulson is to be the principal character, he should be developed more, maybe taking him back to his appointment to Treasury. For that matter, the absence of George W. Bush as a dramatic character (the real man is shown in news clips) seems to leave a big hole in the story, especially when we get occasional reminders of the political pressures Paulson labors under. It's also strange to see John McCain reduced to the back of an actor's head as if we were back in the days when you couldn't show FDR on screen while he lived and ruled, when Ed Harris will play McCain for HBO later this year. Sometimes the film seems too narrow in scope, and sometimes it seems to be trying to do too much at once. We would have been better off with more longer scenes like the one I described earlier; a film like this shouldn't fear exposition -- it is practically all exposition, after all -- when its purpose is to explain a complex process to us. But few scenes are allowed to run as long as they might need to for clarity or character development. A whole film might have been made of any number of scenes in this brisk exercise of little more than 90 minutes, and any of those theoretical films could have made the same points Too Big To Fail did in more effectively dramatic fashion if writers were committed to dramatizing them properly. What I'm saying is that this story had the makings of a great film, while Hanson gave us one that is only effective in a workmanlike way. It does drive one point home very effectively: something is terribly wrong with a social order that obliges the government and taxpayers to bail out largely unrepentant bankers on their own terms in order to prevent their collapse from wiping out multitudes in the economic tsunami that would follow. The banking system may be "too big to fail" but no individual banker should be. If HBO and Curtis Hanson expected anger from their audience, then despite all I've said, we ought to count Too Big To Fail a success -- but that still depends on the audience.

A MAN IN OUR HOUSE (Fi baitina rajul, 1961)

Fifty years ago, movie cameras showed Egypt in revolt.

This was a re-enactment, however. The scene was staged for a film set approximately thirteen years earlier, when Egypt ("Misr" to its Arabic-speaking natives) was still ruled by a monarch who was himself little more than a puppet of Great Britain. In his time, King Farouk was a byword for decadent if not "Oriental" luxury. He was at least as much a kleptocrat as Hosni Mubarak is reputed to have been. Mubarak's fall from power last month appears to have marked the end of an era that began when the "Free Officers" deposed Farouk in a military coup in 1952. That coup was the "miracle" mentioned in the spoken prologue to our film. By the time Henry Barakat directed this patriotic romantic thriller, Gamal Abdel Nasser ruled Egypt as a strongman. Though he was decried as a dictator by the West for his nationalization of the Suez Canal, his violent repression of Islamist dissidents, and his encouragement of a global "non-aligned" movement, Nasser is recognized in retrospect as someone who at least lived frugally and retained the loyalty of the masses until his early demise in 1970. According to Wikipedia, the Egyptian film industry stood at the brink of greater state control in 1961, with Nasser entirely nationalizing the business later in the decade. A Man in Our House thus needn't be treated as state propaganda, but it certainly isn't art for art's sake, either.

Egypt's great gift to global cinema, many will say, is Omar Sharif, who stars here shortly before David Lean and the world claimed him. He plays Ibrahim, a heroic student radical caught with hundreds of others on a railway bridge as sitting ducks for government troops. Many men jump from the bridge in panic; one of them, a friend of Ibrahim's, can't swim. Ibrahim leaps over a railing and into the water to rescue him. Later, he accepts the grim task of assassinating the country's prime minister, a deed done off-screen.

Arrested and roughly interrogated, Ibrahim manages to escape with the help of collaborators with the underground. With a price on his head, he has to hole up with the family of a sympathetic police inspector. The situation becomes something like an Arab Nationalist appropriation of The Diary of Anne Frank, as Ibrahim must spend every hour in the house and worry about every visitor. The most worrisome visitor is Abdel Hamid, an obnoxious cousin of the inspector with an eye on the same younger daughter of the house to whom Ibrahim is attracted. The cousin's habit of inviting himself to holiday dinners sets up one of the film's mundanely suspenseful scenes as Ibrahim hides in the sisters' bedroom, the one room in the house where the cousin won't just barge in. But the cousin notices the obvious, that there's one extra place set at the table, but the family hadn't been expecting him. As it becomes impossible to keep the truth from the cousin, he and Ibrahim play a human chess match, the cousin hoping that Ibrahim will name names of his underground colleagues while Ibrahim feeds him false names in order to discredit him with the underground and the police alike.

The beleaguered family

Finally, Ibrahim has to make a break for it. He takes his leave in a stolen military uniform during a virtuoso performance (to these ears) of the call to prayer, the moment of parting with his new love and the suspense of his escape made more poignant by the potent vocals. There's a nice romantic touch and a cultural lesson for someone like me in the ritual in which Ibrahim and his love each write out the shahada ("There is no God but God...") on a single sheet of paper and tear the sheet in half. Each keeps the half on which the other has written. According to folklore, this ensures that parted lovers will be reunited. But with further plot complications and another risky mission to come, their reunion remains uncertain....

At 152 minutes (Netflix claims 159), A Man in Our House is longer than it really needs to be. Ibrahim's last mission seems tacked on to pad the film out to something like epic length, though it's curious that while the violent last act feels padded, the domestic drama of the long central act inside the house didn't seem padded at all. Barakat has a decent ensemble cast at his disposal, though my unfamiliarity with them as movie personalities may make the characters seem more real to me than they may have to regular Egyptian moviegoers. As a director he makes the most of his main interior set, which gives him plenty of opportunities for compositions in depth of family members moving through doorways and hallways. The domestic drama of Ibrahim's extended visit apparently interested him more than the more conventional heroic stuff toward the end, though the early scene-setting mass protests are also impressively staged. As for Omar Sharif, you probably only had to look into his eyes to see that he was destined for the big leagues. His star charisma is indisputable, and it's a tribute to the rest of the cast that he doesn't overwhelm them.

The stalker stalked. A nice noirish moment filmed on location.

Barakat's film is also a relic of a time when largely secular optimism prevailed in Egypt and the wider Arab world. While Ibrahim and other characters keep the religious holidays and express routine piety, there's hardly a sign of anything you could call "Islamism" anywhere on screen. While the matriarch of the house dresses in modestly traditional fashion, her daughters wear western clothes without anyone fussing. All the mother asks is that they take their shoes and stockings off indoors. Ibrahim himself is no bearded extremist but a clean-shaven man, no doubt designed as a role model of Egyptian modernism. Had I watched A Man in Our House a few months earlier, I might have found it a more poignant glimpse into a more irretrievably lost world. But the impression I've gotten from Egypt in 2011 is that the Ibrahims and their comrades and their world are still there, even if Nasser's political legacy is doomed to the historic ashbin. If anything, with no prime ministers needing killing...yet...they may have gotten things more right this time. If so, then Fi baitina rajul, though no great film by any means, may have historic significance as a testament to Egypt's enduring resilience against tyranny.

LA GUERRE EST FINIE (1966)

It must have been tough for Alain Resnais to release a film like this one when he did, at at time when political radicalism was surging in French culture and the arts were expected to express commitment to revolutionary causes. The title alone ("The war is over") is a bit of a buzzkill, and from a radical perspective, the whole film could only be worse. It tells of a burnt-out revolutionary, a Spaniard in exile but working underground to subvert the decades-old tyranny of Francisco Franco. The Spaniard is played by Yves Montand, a radical among actors and one so French that a character has to remark that no one would mistake him for a Spaniard when he speaks French. The perpetual pressure of surveillance and pursuit are getting to him, and so is a growing sense of the futility of his work. The left lost the Spanish Civil War in 1939. The exiles and their handful of contacts inside Spain may still dream of toppling Franco by staging a general strike, but our hero -- who goes by several names -- finds it hard to keep dreaming.

Then again, he may just be suffering a midlife crisis. He has a mistress in France (Ingrid Thulin) who wants to have his baby, but he has the hots for Nadine (Genevieve Bujold), a student radical who stole her father's passport for our hero's use and pretended that he was her father when Spanish security called her. On more than one level, our hero, if we can call him that, is in a crisis of commitment. But is it just a midlife crisis in the conventional bourgeois sense of the word or is his disillusionment with the underground life driving him to question all his personal commitments? The latter, I think, since he proves just as unable to commit to Nadine's more radical cause. She and her student friends want him to smuggle explosives into Spain so their contacts can perpetrate terrorist bombings in order to damage the Spanish tourist industry. To him, this sounds as futile as his own comrades' general-strike idea. While revolutionaries young and old are capable of manipulating Leninist dialectic to justify anything they want to do and condemn naysayers, our hero insists on being realistic. He's no longer willing to do something or anything just to gratify a revolutionary whim. Maybe that's because he's seen too many friends pay the price without progress to show for it over nearly thirty years. But his own failure to commit isn't total; he isn't about to quit either, no matter what the risk to himself. And I don't have to spoil anything by revealing the ending, because the ending itself leaves us in suspense, as if suspense were our hero's natural state.

Gevevieve Bujold as the hero's sex fantasy (above) and his underground contact (below)

There's something noirish in the recurring narration as Resnais and screenwriter Jorge Semprun invite us to empathize with Montand's crises and temptations. But the film's style is modernist rather than expressionist, frenetically edited with the camera almost constantly on the move, the narrative moving sometimes at the speed of Montand's consciousness. This is a movie to which frozen screencaps can't really do justice, though every frame is handsomely shot. We see things through Montand's eyes, sometimes reflecting, sometimes anticipating, sometimes fantasizing. In a sense, La Guerre est Finie is a psychological thriller about a man in peril approaching a moral rather than a psychological breaking point. I can imagine that the film and its director were denounced just as the Montand character is denounced by oldschool Leninists and New Left radicals within the film itself. But I don't know if it really can be called an anti-revolutionary film. It's not as if Resnais and Semprun are calling for anyone to give up and accept Spain as it was. And it's not as if they're questioning revolutionary commitment itself. But the filmmakers are too committed to the literary imperatives of their art to ignore the human cost of revolution or resistance. A more dogmatic revolutionary consciousness might demand unconditional affirmation and assurance of ultimate victory. But by refusing to turn revolution into a fantasy, Resnais may only have made his troubled revolutionary more of a hero.

MEET JOHN DOE (1941) - The Secular Apocalypse of Frank R. Capra

It's Christmas. Let's call it Christmas 1940, with a presidential campaign settled and FDR safely re-elected for a third term after a third-party scare that proved more ephemeral than most. This one self-destructed on the launch pad of Wrigley Field as a national radio audience listened, but there's one loose end that nags at people this holiday season. The blasphemy of it sticks in some minds. Christmas is a celebration of birth and a promise of new birth for everybody, but the third-party movement, despite its rhetoric of neighborliness and good will toward men, was founded on a promise of suicide -- on this of all days. Most people now believe there was no such promise, or certainly not a sincere one, but we all saw it in print, and if you see it in the Bulletin it must be so. The man we thought had made the promise has been missing since the summer. Since most folks consider him a con man who did it all for the money, the fact that he remains on the loose, despite being briefly one of the most famous faces in the country, is troubling only because he ought to be in jail. But those who know the truth about what happened at the Chicago convention know that, like Jesus, "John Doe" was traveling the path of prophecy, and this year's Christmas prophecy is one easily fulfilled. With that knowledge it's hard to be soothed by carolers. You won't sleep easily until you've saved the life of the man you destroyed, so he'll stay destroyed. That man, meanwhile, has his holidays backward. He's playing out a Passion in the desperate hope that sacrifice will effect a resurrection. If a broken-down ballplayer dies tonight, John Doe might live again....

The two most ambitious American films of 1941 share an interest in the power of the media. It was a natural subject both for Orson Welles and Frank Capra, for it was their power. Both men had shaken the nation, Welles with his War of the Worlds hoax broadcast, Capra with his borderline sacrilegious Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which had been criticized by some people in 1939 for besmirching American democracy before a hostile world. More so than Citizen Kane, Meet John Doe is the director's troubled meditation on his own power. On another level, I think, it's also about Orson Welles. Capra was the one established Hollywood director in a position to answer the challenge of the wonder-boy newcomer from New York -- the top dog in his own mind, the "name above the title" man who had already established to his satisfaction that a film should reflect the will of the director more than anyone else. Some of the Doe advertising took the director-as-star principle so far as to include Capra's face alongside those of the stars or the picture. While others presumably sulked enviously over Welles's incredible deal with RKO, Capra made a deal of his own with Warner Bros, breaking loose from Columbia Pictures. It was arguably a better deal than Welles's because Frank Capra Productions would own Doe. On the other hand, Capra was playing with his own money, while Welles was not. In any event, I assume that Capra's objective, in part, was to top whatever Welles was working on.

Both productions were top-secret, Capra's title evolving from an original "Life of John Doe" to the more ominous "Life and Death of John Doe" before reaching its final form without the public or the publicists learning much about the story. The advertising remained vague throughout the original release. I've read one 1941 article that paired Doe and Kane as the most anticipated films of the year and noted that Doe was the bigger mystery of the two. Did Capra and Welles know more about each other's projects? I don't know, but I'd be surprised if Capra didn't see himself in competition with Welles. That both men made films about the media may be a coincidence, but probably wasn't an accident. And the plainest proof that Welles was on Capra's mind all the while may be the fact that Meet John Doe is all about a hoax.

In the 21st century we regard media moguls like Rupert Murdoch with suspicion and distrust, but those feelings were arguably stronger in 1940, when men like William Randolph Hearst had a record of actively pursuing political power. Today, media moguls like Silvio Berlusconi have held power elsewhere, but his American counterparts don't seem likely to imitate him. If anything, in the future politicians may make themselves media stars as an essential step toward power. In 1940, when both Capra and Welles were filming, it seemed all too plausible that people who manipulated public opinion for a living would use their power to make themselves rulers of men. Capra's film addresses that threat more directly, while Welles and Herman Mankiewicz are more concerned with getting inside the head of their crypto-Hearst. Capra and Robert Riskin are less interested in what makes D. B. Norton tick. Their villain is a cypher compared to Kane, with no apparent psychological motivation for seeking political power. He has no compulsion to act as the people's protector or benefactor. Instead, after keeping him cryptic for most of the film, Capra reveals Norton as an outright fascist who hopes to exercise power with an iron hand.

Edward Arnold as D. B. Norton gets a huge buildup as a man of mysterious menace before putting in his first appearance at the 28 minute mark while reviewing the D. B. Norton Motor Corps.

Casting counts. Meet John Doe is often described as the third film of a Capra trilogy that also includes Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, all three being tales of naive "cinderella men" getting crushed by the establishment but bouncing back again. I'd agree that Doe concludes a trilogy, but the first film of the set isn't Deeds, but You Can't Take It With You, the film immediately preceding Smith. This trilogy is defined by the recurring figure of Edward Arnold as the antagonist. In each film he grows more powerful and intractable. In You Can't he's just a grumpy businessman who finally loosens up for a happy ending. In Smith he's a state political boss who ends the film at bay due to Senator Smith's persistence and Senator Paine's dramatic confession. In Doe he's building a national media empire understood by everyone as his gateway to greater political influence. At the climax, D. B. Norton is dared to destroy the Doe movement, and defied by a hero who thinks he can't do it. He can. I think that Capra was working something out in his mind by reusing Arnold and making him more powerful in each film. He may simply have been making the most of a great character actor, but the recurrence and resurgence of the Arnold villain may also illustrate Capra's questioning of his own patented "Capracorn" scenarios.

While Citizen Kane expresses Welles's narcissism by presenting multiple perspectives of his own title character, Meet John Doe expresses Capra's narcissism by making its main characters partial reflections of his own creative personality. It takes the cinderella-man formula to the ultimate level as embittered columnist Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck) creates her cinderella man ex nihilo as a spiteful practical joke on the new editor who's just fired her. She makes her word flesh by recruiting the starving has-been pitcher "Long John" Willoughby (Gary Cooper), who had come to the newspaper office seeking a job, to be the public face of her suicidal malcontent persona.

The screen darkens ominously as Ann (Barbara Stanwyck) invents John Doe. Below, things go dark for Long John Willoughby (Gary Cooper) after he's recruited to play Doe.

A turning point comes when Ann, on her mother's advice, abandons negativity and invests the Doe character with her dead father's optimistic spirit just as Willoughby must speak publicly as Doe for the first time. But as Norton discovers a potential in the message that Willoughby himself doesn't yet appreciate, he seeks to remake Doe in his own image. It's like the making of an American antichrist by an unholy trinity of the ambitious Mitchell, the initially venal but guileless Willoughby and the ultimately sinister Norton, with the spectre of the dead father offering the only hope of redemption. Ann, reimagining Doe as her father, claims to have fallen in love with her creation, easily confused with its incarnation as Willoughby. Crushing on Ann almost from the start, Willoughby begins to identify with her father to an alarming extent revealed as he recounts a dream in which he is both himself ("The real me, John Doe -- that is, Long John Willoughby") and her father, and both are "whacking" away at an Ann grown from child to bride through dream logic. Long John experiences a euphoric breakdown in order to be remade as John Doe. He resists at first, agreeing to rat out Ann and the Bulletin on live radio for $5,000 from a rival paper, only to renege and read Ann's speech in order to impress her -- only to be embarrassed and disgusted with himself afterwards. He thinks he made a fool of himself, even though or especially because he got into the reading at points, despite some well-acted awkwardness and mike fright by Cooper. He runs away because he feels like a sap, assuming that the speech was a disaster and knowing not what he wrought.

Above, "John Doe" poses with representative "Little People" before his debut speech.

Capra knew that the media sent mixed messages, some unintentional. We know that he knew this because he demonstrated the malleability of message in his next released film, the War Department documentary Prelude to War, much of which was a dramatic detournement of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. What Riefenstahl meant to be inspiring, Capra made alarming and appalling. What she portrayed as volk solidarity he presented as dehumanized regimentation. In Meet John Doe, Willoughby's over-enthusiastic, sometimes inept reading of Ann's speech miraculously galvanizes a grass-roots movement into existence. The message got through in spite of the messenger, though Willoughby's lack of polish may have worked in its favor by making him seem sincere. In any event, Capra and Riskin would probably argue that the real message came from Ann's father, channeled through her and Willoughby, and as the film would say with desperate urgency later, "the idea is still good."

Would it still be good if Norton got his way? Would the John Doe message change substantially once it was dedicated to putting him in power? That bit is actually unclear, and that's a flaw of the film. From the beginning, everyone assumes that Norton has bought the Bulletin to advance a political agenda. For most of the picture, however, he holds his ideological cards close to his vest. As far as we know, the John Doe philosophy up to the debacle in Chicago is whatever Ann says it is. Not even her hard-boiled editor Connell (James Gleason), who seems to set the Bulletin's agenda more than Norton does initially, appears to have input in her columns. Connell was hired when Norton bought the paper. One would presume some sort of intellectual affinity between the two, and that Ann's Doe pieces should be consistent with overall editorial policy. Yet Connell abruptly turns on Norton after his question about his boss's political ambitions is rebuffed, and on no more evidence than that, as far as we see, the editor denounces Norton to Willoughby as a "Fifth Columnist." He's proven right, of course, but before that the most fascistic thing about Norton was his sponsorship of a potentially paramilitary motorcycle club. The only other thing we know about him is that his money comes from oil. But would such a would-be fascist simply have let the Doe movement evolve as Ann alone willed it until he decided to order her to endorse him? Is the Doe message the ideal foundation for the election of someone like Norton?

Is the John Doe message itself implicitly fascist? I don't think so, but Capra and Riskin may have been worried. They portray the Doe philosophy as a pretty simplistic, populistic form of neighborliness. It's an appeal to empathy that transforms Willoughby as he transforms his audiences. Willoughby himself has had bad influences, most notably his traveling companion of the last few years, "the Colonel" (Walter Brennan). His title is either imaginary or ironic, since it's impossible to imagine this character giving or taking orders. The Colonel is one of the earliest manifestations of a character type that became more common later in American film: a paranoid loner. While ultimately a sympathetic character by virtue of his loyalty to Willoughby, the Colonel also represents a wrong path for Americans of isolation and distrust. He so completely lacks any sense of entitlement that he feels better off owning nothing. He equates absolute poverty with serenity, since the helots ("a lot of heels") don't bother you if you don't have money. Since other people are such a hell for him, you have to wonder why he sticks with Willoughby, but I leave that for others to speculate about. In any event, it's one of Walter Brennan's greatest performances (and you can say that down the line for the entire lead cast), in which he taps deeply into the dark side of his folksiness for once. While his loyalty to Willoughby may redeem the Colonel, Willoughby himself is set on the road to redemption simply by having the hots for Ann. Despite himself and the suspicions the Colonel probably taught him, Willoughby wants to make good as Doe to impress Ann. More importantly, because he makes a personal connection with her, her words and ideas, which she herself dismisses as platitudes, become newly meaningful for him. In turn, he somehow conveys that meaningfulness to the John Does who see and hear him, and they respond by "tearing down all the fences," metaphorically speaking, and bonding with one another.

In the end, however, for all that Capra hints that the John Doe movement will live again whether Willoughby dies or not, the movie implicitly repudiates that populism that we identify with Capra's own work. Following the familiar Capra archetype, Willoughby is publicly humiliated, and his defeat seems complete. Unlike other Capra heroes, Willoughby is damned by the truth, though he insists that the idea is still good.

The convention scene is a suspenseful demonstration of Willoughby's failure to master the media that made him. Here, with time running out before Norton arrives to denounce him, Long John is stuck waiting, after having to stand through an anthem, for an well-meaning but oblivious minister to call a moment of silence for the "John Does of the world." By the time the moment is over, so is the John Doe movement.

To redeem the idea, he resolves to fulfill the promise that Ann never intended her fictional creation to fulfill. Norton has suspected this and brings men to the skyscraper to thwart Willoughby or erase any evidence of his suicide. Willoughby thinks he has Norton checkmated by making copies of a new suicide note, but Ann intervenes to argue that he doesn't have to die. Here we come to the great controversy about the film's ending. Capra admitted to filming several alternate finishes, and the actual finish was altered after the film opened. According to one contemporary newspaper account, the premiere version included an implausible renunciation by Norton of his evil ways, while I've also read accounts of an epilogue with Long John, Ann and the Colonel starting some kind of charity house. Whatever the alternatives were, Capra himself remained dissatisfied with the finish, and posterity took its cues from him. He felt he had painted himself into a corner by having "Saint George and the dragon" effectively destroy each other at the convention, leaving him no right way to resolve the suicide question.

Audiences have been unconvinced by Ann's citation of Jesus as "the first John Doe" whose death makes Willoughby's unnecessary, or by the apologetic reappearance of the small-town Does we've followed since the middle of the picture. I don't think the film would have been improved by anyone going off the roof, and I think the final ending works consistently with the rest of the movie. First of all, neither we nor Willoughby need to be persuaded by Ann's babble about Jesus. Let's not confuse the rhetoric with the message. Long John isn't dissuaded from jumping because he realizes that Jesus is his savior, but because he realizes finally that Ann loves the real John -- Willoughby, not Doe. Secondly, whether or not you believe that Jesus was the first John Doe, the operative point -- the one that repudiates populism -- is that John Willoughby doesn't have to be John Doe to do good in the world, nor does anyone else. The whole exercise of inventing John Doe to represent public discontent was only asking someone like Norton to fill a vessel that was inevitably going to be partially empty with the malignancy of power. The ironic flaw of the movement was that, for all its empowerment of multitudes at the grass roots, everyone still looked to John Doe for leadership and inspiration. Take John Doe out of the equation, Capra suggests, and the idea is still good. Ann may be over-optimistic about her and Long John becoming leaders of a revived movement, but as long as the people reclaim the idea, Connell's mighty closing challenge still stands: "The people, Norton! Try and lick that!"

Meet John Doe's problematic nature is a mark of Capra's ambition at a turning point in his career. If not his masterpiece, it is certainly his epic, and as such it's a major though underrated American film. I can't bring myself to call it a better film than Citizen Kane, but I like it better for its more expansive political consciousness and its more thoughtful exploitation of the two films' common media-mogul subject matter. Doe doesn't advance the narrative art of film the way Kane does, but with Capra still at the peak of his power and with Slavko Vorkapich montages, his film is state of the pre-Kane art. The two films complement each other quite nicely, though they're rarely seen as peer works. Welles's more humanistic approach has helped Kane stand the test of time better even though the films share many common concerns of their time. But I won't be the first to note in the era of Tea Parties and alleged "astroturfing" of grass-roots movements that Meet John Doe might be more relevant now than it's been in a long time. Just right now, however, it's relevant because it's Christmas.