Meet John Doe Rating: Release Date: 13 February, 2001 Retail Price: $19.99 OUR Price: $17.99 You SAVE: $2.00! Cast: Gary Cooper Barbara Stanwyck Walter Brennan Edward Arnold Complete Cast (11 total)

Meet John Doe Reviews

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An Important American Film...
...but buyers should be forwarned that the print from which this DVD is made was a poor one, and Alpha Video, the distributors of this classic Capra movie, made no attempt to clean it up.

Here we have an example of a key artwork about America's psychological and political framework during emergence from the economic depression of the 1930s, crying out for careful restration to the condition it so deserves.

Endgame
The print looks like you're watching it through muddy water; is this something to do with the unclear "public domain" status of this and other of Capra's works? Doesn't he have a family that could help out his DVDs the way that Chaplin's family has done, or even, to use the opposite extreme, the family of Edgar Ulmer, who have released superlative versions of some pretty dicey movies? The point is that if people are paying for something they deserve to get it served up nice, and all the various DVDS of MEET JOHN DOE are painful to watch.

We've heard for years of the re-worked ending of the film, and that another one exists (or existed at one time). Bring it on! For now the pleasure is nearly entirely in watching Gary Cooper react to Barbara Stanwyck's pure life. It's sort of like BALL OF FIRE but a bit more subtle. Moviemakers knew they were on to agood thing teaming the two, because Cooper's slow-moving, nearly snakelike screen presence got an injection of caffeine when placed next to Stanwyck's vibrant beauty and her gorgeous clear gaze and complexion. She doesn't even have to speak, she emanates something very basic in her bones and her posture. Okay, the movie writes itself into a corner, for what else is going to happen except that if Gary Cooper is not going to kill himself the movie will break the trust it's established with the viewers. This has always been DOE's problem, that it has to cheat to come out ahead of itself, and it didn't work in 1943 and it still isn't working now. It's great up until about an hour and fifteen minutes; then you feel the gears start to whine and complain as "Hollywood" tries to solve a basically philosophical dilemma.

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