capsule reviews

meet john doe, rope, dietrich + sternberg

James Stewart, John Dall, and Farley Granger in Rope (1948)

Meet John Doe (Frank Capra, 1941)

For years, I’ve thought I’d already seen this movie. I thought it was the one full of jokes about how rude people are in Vermont. Spoiler alert: no, it’s not. I’m pretty sure that movie is actually William Wellman’s Nothing Sacred, but in any case it’s definitely not Meet John Doe, a movie with, as far as I noticed, zero jokes about Vermont.

I absolutely loathed this movie—which I didn’t think was even possible for me to feel about a movie starring Barbara Stanwyck. I dragged Capra out for that political art post but this movie absolutely represents “political art” in its most insipid sense. It somehow is both gratingly preachy, completely stopping the action for several long speeches, and extremely vague in its actual politics. Have you ever been in a conversation wi…