hat we need is fireworks!” At The New Bulletin paper, housecleaning is afoot. All the old-timers are unceremoniously fired, including columnist Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck), after wealthy buyer D.B. Norton (Edward Arnold) takes over. Despite begging to keep her position, even for a considerable cut in pay, she’s still given the boot. As a final protest, her last article is a “phony letter” from an unnamed man, who insists that he’ll leap to his death from the roof of City Hall. This outrageous claim doesn’t go unheard, however, riling up the mayor and capturing the attentions of readers everywhere, who demand that “John Doe” be found and given a job.

“The mayor’s practically ready to adopt him!” Slimy politics are to blame for the rampant unemployment that incited the current situation, but it’s Ann who is at the heart of whipping up a doozy of a tall tale, perfect for the sentiment of the era. And with her eye for sensationalism, she’s ready to continue cooking up stories, using a fake persona to regale the masses with self-reflexive information about their own dire situations. Simplicity and a lack of resources or means is equated to freedom, which accruing wealth stifles – but that’s an outlook that only former baseball player and current drifter “Long John” Willoughby (Gary Cooper) and his fellow railway itinerant, the skeptical “colonel” (Walter Brennan), steadfastly believe, who are recruited to take over the role of Doe and a pal to keep the facade going. The bulk of the country is after money, though readers are also quick to digest doom and despair, agreeing with the contempt at civilization for its acceptance of widespread graft, corruption, and a sense of diminishing human decency.

Sharing some similarities with “His Girl Friday,” particularly with its fast-talking newspaperwoman and the notions of rivalry, oneupmanship, and runaway lies, it also adopts screwball comedy sensibilities, even as it embraces director Frank Capra’s knack for Americanism (and idealistic patriotism). Principles and honesty tend to win out, though the scenario of a little scam escalating into massive, unwieldy fraud creates plenty of hilarity – and a nerve-wracking scenario that threatens to catastrophically collapse. Engagingly, in the deceivers’ efforts to secure a representative of the common man, they accidentally hire an honorable one – one who grows conflicted not at the truths he spreads through Ann’s speechwriting, but at the untruths they’re founded upon.

As with many films from the ‘40s, the characters here are either terribly sympathetic or despicable, exactly as they’re designed to be; few shades of gray crop up, though Ann’s role, expectedly, must discover the follies in pursuing monetary success above all else. It certainly helps that a buoyant romance arises as a means for that ethical transition. Goodwill (primarily through the messaging of being a gracious neighbor) is conducted ostensibly, though it’s actually generated as a circulation stunt to sell viewership, obscuring the unrealized disconnect between the upper class and the working people – the real source of discontent. “Gee whiz. I’m all mixed up.”

Commentary on politics and misinformation/disinformation is curiously timeless and topical, mulling over fake news and its power to manipulate (and the desire for a following and the spotlight), decades before it would become hyper-relevant yet again in the modern political arena (including fifth-column talk and whispers of dictatorship). Plus, the exploitation of useful idiots and the warping of righteous notions and institutions into tools of persuasion and deception, which can turn hostile and dangerous, are potent (“I had no idea what was going on”), even against the backdrop of heartwarming stories of civility and compassion between the rank and file. Though it aptly reuses themes from “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” tackling malfeasance with the idea that virtuous people will somehow win over the immoral, it goes on a touch too long, revealing its intentions with a bit too much obviousness and repetition. Fortunately, Cooper and Stanwyck are entirely watchable, even if the plot grows artistically flagrant and thematically hollow, culminating in a final media ruse that is thoroughly farfetched, and a finale featuring average Joes who are excessively, unrealistically perceptive. “Dreams are sure crazy, aren’t they?”

– Mike Massie