It's impossible to watch this movie today without the miasma of a year's bitter primary campaigning oozing in around the edges of Frank Capra's bumpy tale of a forgotten but otherwise happy man tempted and victimized by cynics and optimists alike. There are too many parallels and sad reminders that not much has changed in our political discourse over the past 75 years, and like us I guess, the film can't quite commit to either cynicism or optimism.

John Doe isn't real. He's the product of the disgruntled imagination of Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck), a sob sister columnist for the Bulletin, who has just been laid off by the paper's new management. The old Bulletin's motto was "A Free Press Means a Free People;" the New Bulletin is "A Streamlined Newspaper for a Streamlined Era." Ann's parting shot at the new paper was to invent a letter for her column from an unemployed Everyman (Doe) who vows to leap off City Hall on Christmas Eve to protest the sorry state of American civilization. Most people in the newspaper game suspect this is a hoax, but the public believes the story and floods the New Bulletin with offers to help and pleas for Someone to do Something.

In order to avoid exposure managing editor Henry Connell (James Gleason) hires Ann back to help manage the public's expectations and to figure out a way to cover up the fraud. Luckily, a stampede of tramps has descending on the offices claiming to be John Doe in order to get the work and other help offered by the citizenry. Ann persuades Connell to pick one of these men to pose as the "real" John Doe and use him as a front to write a column about the plight of downtrodden regular folks and to boost circulation.

They hire "Long" John Willoughby (Gary Cooper), a strapping, kind of dopey ex-ballplayer who never goes anywhere without his friend, a professional hobo called The Colonel (Walter Brennan). The Colonel believes that anyone who keeps money of any amount for any length of time is bound to be corrupted. "When you become a guy with a bank account, they gotcha, " he says, Who's gotcha? Heelots (a lot of heels) gotcha, because when you have money people want to sell you stuff and then you're caught, "you're not the free and happy guy you used to be, then you become a Heelot* yourself."

Sheesh. Who is that guy, Bernie Sanders' dad?

So here's the score so far: Ann's original column is a cynical move but it stimulates the public's optimism and basic decency. Willoughby makes the cynical decision to pretend to be John Doe, but is optimistic that it will help him earn enough money to get his pitching arm fixed. The Colonel walks around calling everyone Heelots and threatening to redistribute any wealth coming his way, which is either extra-cynical or wildly optimistic, depending on who you're voting for this cycle.

​Pretty soon everyone starts getting in over their heads. Ann's column is a huge success, but it's ruffling political and journalistic feathers. The Bulletin's new publisher, D. B. Norton (Edward Arnold), makes a deal with Ann to put Willoughby on the radio as John Doe to put to rest suspicions that he's a fake (which he is), while providing Norton with a populist proxy for his political ambitions with Ann writing speeches at triple her former salary. Win-win.

Ann needs the money, by the way, because she is the breadwinner for her widowed mother (Spring Byington) and two school-aged sisters. Her mother has a habit of giving the leftover household money away on the needy, which Ann finds both irritating and inspirational. And at 62 cents on a man's 1941 dollar, a raise would come in handy. Mrs. Mitchell helps Ann past her speech-writing block by suggesting that "People are tired of hearing nothing but doom and despair on the radio... Why don't you let him say something simple and real. Something with hope in it?" So Ann writes a real barn burner and in the process, starts to believe in this John Doe stuff.

Willoughby, meanwhile, is offered $5,000 from a rival newspaper to read an alternate speech on the night of the broadcast confessing to the hoax. Gary Cooper does a masterful job conveying his internal conflict while deciding what to do​: admit the hoax, ease his conscience, and get the operation he needs, or do right by Ann, with whom is is falling in love, and read her speech about tearing down fences, loving your neighbor, and being decent. He decides to go ahead with Ann's speech, but bolts with The Colonel immediately afterward to slip back into a life of poor but honest obscurity.

But Willoughby can't hide for long from Norton's media machine. While he and Bernie's dad have been out riding the rails, "John Doe Clubs" have been popping up all over; just regular citizens picking up his call to be nice to one other. And No Politicians Allowed. He is recognized at a local diner, corralled by "fans" and convinced by a local John Doe Club in one of the more tedious, Capra-esque, aw-shucks, cornfields of a speech to go back on the radio and spread the word.

Soon John Doe Clubs are spreading like wildfire. D.B. Norton is thrilled, because it's an election year and he has plans to make Willoughby announce the formation of a new political party and endorse Norton as The John Doe Party candidate for president. But John Doe Clubs are specifically apolitical, Ann and Willoughby remind Norton, and that would be wrong. Oh wise up, kids. Besides, Norton explains, he could very easily expose the whole racket that Ann concocted in the first place and ruin them both.

The kids don't back down; Norton exposes Willoughby on national radio and steps in as the savior of the movement. John Doe's once adoring fans are heartbroken and angry and they turn on him It isn't pretty. A despondent Willoughby disappears. Months go by and around Christmas time the main characters start to wonder whether he'll make his way to City Hall and make good on the original plan: throw himself off the roof in protest over how horrible people are.

Sure enough, that's where he winds up. He almost does it too, but a feverish Ann, a less cranky Colonel, and Bulletin editor Connell are there to stop him. Even Norton is there to convince him, in his sincere but Scroogey way, that it would be pointless to kill himself, because he'd just remove all traces of John's existence (come on, he's trying). What does the trick ultimately, is the cornball members of the first John Doe club -- also on the roof, at midnight, in the snow -- telling him they don't care if he's a fake, the message was a good one and whaddyasay? Ann faints from illness; Willoughby carries her off the roof (the regular way).

Is this a happy ending? I don't know, does Ann die of fever? This is the trouble with conservative Capra directing the script of liberal Robert Riskin: the tone is all over the place. The Heelot stuff is meant to be annoying, but Ann's mother is just as free with other people's money, and somehow she's more sympathetic. Why is the Colonel a crackpot and Mrs. Mitchell the heart of the people?

In the end it all goes to pieces HARD and big money wins again: that one rich bad apple probably became president for all we know. At the beginning of the picture, Long John Willoughby's is broke and can't afford an operation that will save his baseball career, but he has a friend and a harmonica and freedom. At the end, he's just as broke, still can't pitch, his friends love him, but now he wants to jump off the roof. Why? Because he had hope? Because no one turns on a savior faster than his disappointed followers?

That's bleak, man. No wonder It's a Wonderful Life  is the Christmas picture.

This post is my contribution to the CMBA Spring Blogathon: Words! Words! Words!

There's a lot going on over there, so please catch up and read all the entries in this wordfest.

I finished re-reading Christopher Morley's excellent, deftly told, first-person narrative of an American "shanty" Irish girl's life story as of her 28th year in 1939 seconds before re-viewing the film Kitty Foyle (1940), for the first time since the (first?) Clinton administration. I hope I speak for every woman my darling late grandmother's age (coincidentally within one year of the heroine Kitty Foyle and her portrayer, Ginger Rogers) when I say, "What the hell with the opening montage?! Said context-setting kick in the ovaries implies that white collar girls gave up chivalry and decorous baby-making for (whaddyacallit) citizenship, which, naturally, means no more pedestal-placing by men, more rudeness on streetcars, and less pay and no recognition for the same work forever. 

You asked for it, Girlie.

And the film, thereafter, cedes the humanness and agency of the book's heroine and devolves into a kind of love triangle completely dissociated from the message of the book from which it was adapted -- by no less than Dalton Trumbo and Donald Ogden Stewart. So, yeah, it's a disappointing book-to-screen translation. Ginger Rogers won an Academy Award for her performance, but I'd like to think she'd have had a better time with the original text.

The novel is the story of Katherine "Kitty" Foyle, a young woman coming of age in Philadelphia in the late 1920s. She is the youngest child in a working class family with modest expectations of social mobility through public education and American ingenuity. Kitty's mother dies when the girl is not yet a teenager and she sent to live with her aunt and uncle in a Chicago suburb. There she makes friends and develops ambitions, but must foreswear the college she is admitted to in order to care for her father who has had a stroke back in Philly. Fundamentally, it is about how a young girl navigates a life between a city and suburb in two different states, the friendships she forms, and how she comes to make her way in the world during one of the most difficult economic and social times in our history.

Let me pause to point out that this book was written nearly 80 years ago by a man approaching 50 in the credible voice of a twenty-something woman. Christopher Morley is surprisingly adept and insightful as the narrator. Like most of his books, it crackles with wonderful dialog in the first few chapters, repeats itself somewhat tediously in the middle, then picks up again at the end. In Kitty Foyle there is much observation about the difference between Men and Women, which becomes a bit of a snooze with repetition after one marvels at how nothing much has changed in that regard since the book was written. Also, Morley never has had the heart to "kill his darlings," so redundant aphorisms tend to abound. The important thing is that our heroine falls in love with a man outside her class, has a happy sexual relationship with him, gets pregnant, then terminates that pregnancy (because she has access to a safe one, as white women in certain circles have always had) rather than upset the father's comfortable life and goes on to enjoy a healthy career, a new (if less volatile) romance, and a solid group of friends and family who love her. That's the book.

The film, however, downplays both the fundamental intelligence of its heroine and the moral weakness of  her love interest and inflates the influence of the men in her life. The movie would have you believe that Kitty was attracted to the wealthy Philadelphia set her whole life; whereas the book only mentions them as a touchstone for her paper doll fantasies. The fact that her lover turns out to be one of the Philadelphia Main Line is a point of intense difficulty for her in the novel, not one of aspiration as the film suggests. The men in the film are given all the "good" lines about the nature of life and work.

Which is excessively annoying to one who has, literally, just put down the book.

Wyn Strafford, the weakling socialite in question, is played admirably in the film, if not faithfully to the novel, by Dennis Morgan. In the book Wyn is the kind of guy who has had things so softened for him by circumstance than any risk he might possibly conceive to undertake is utterly circumscribed by the narrow confines of his privilege. And Kitty is fully aware that while fundamentally a sweet guy, Wyn is ill-equipped to meet her at the level of her own experience.

Let's take the magazine Wyn starts and which employs young Kitty Foyle. In the book they have already begun their love affair when Wyn tries his hand at publishing and she is already accustomed to correcting his spelling and editing his clumsy prose to make him come across more erudite than he is. Wyn started the mag to prove that he could make it on his own outside the family banking business, with just his own pluck, a couple of bored fraternity brothers, and the $10,000 nut his father gave him -- you know, boot straps.

The film would have you think that Kitty is learning from Wyn in this endeavor, which is quite wrong. In the book, she knows the venture will fail from the start, because it's a copy of the New Yorker and Philly isn't that kind of town and Kitty knows something about regular people and their tastes. Kitty also knows, that when the magazine folds (and it will) that she is the one who will be left struggling to find work to support herself and her dying father (another element left out of the movie).

But Kitty loves Wyn. A lot. So much, that she has a protracted and glorious love affair with him, even though it is 1930-ish, they are not married, and the class difference between them would be impossible for Wyn to overcome. "There never was anybody whose whole existence was so settled upon a whole lot of people doing a comfortable makebelieve" she says in the book. Wyn himself "knew nothing of life, all its small anxieties and makeshifts, problems of grocery bills and insurance and clean clothes..."

Nevertheless, Kitty goes all in knowing this about Wyn and knowing that she risks so very much more, because she is a woman and  "when a woman gives up her conventions she's really handing you something." Kitty knows Wyn is clueless about his privilege as both a rich person and also as a man. So when at about the same time she discovers, via the society column, that Wyn has become engaged to a more suitable someone else, she also discovers, via the calendar, that she is pregnant, she decides never to tell him. In the book, she terminates the pregnancy, because she knew "Wyn wasn't big enough to have a bastard; or the folks he had to live with wouldn't let him be. It would be making people unhappy for the sake of somebody that didn't really exist yet."

The film has them marry before she gets pregnant and divorced before she gives birth to a dead child. Because that's so much better. Wyn knows nothing of her pregnancy or the possibility that he may have to provide for it had it lived; it didn't and he won't ever have had to.

Meanwhile, Kitty has affable Dr. Mark Eisen (James Craig) in the wings; more front-and-center and WASP-y in the film, more peripheral and Jewish in the book.

Which reminds me... as much as I love Christopher Morley (see photo below) his work contains several encrusted passe tropes of his time, including liberal use of the Black "dialect" and several words we just don't use anymore, and that can be a little rough in the reading. There are even some barnacles I hadn't realized we'd already shucked. For instance, Kitty refers several times to having to overcome her race prejudice to consider Mark as a potential husband, and each time she mentioned it, it took me a moment to realize she was talking about Jews and not Black people. 

I forgot about that, even though in real life at approximately the same time my late grandfather was obliged to attend Middlesex University (now Brandeis) for medical school, because it was the only one in his neck of the woods that didn't have a Jewish quota. The girl he married was my aforementioned darling grandmother, a white collar working (Jewish) girl who may or may not have inspired Christopher Morley himself to write a poem about her, a lovely young woman on a subway in New York -- family apocryphra I prefer to think is true, if not even remotely verified, thank you very much. All of which makes me wonder, when did we Jews make the transition to white?

In sum, if you haven't seen Kitty Foyle the film, read the book instead and if you've only read the book, don't see the film: it will annoy you for not retaining the excellent dialog or telling the right story. Either way, read the book and give the picture a miss. The clothes are great and the boys are handsome, but it's got none of the friendships, family, or true feeling of the real Kitty Foyle.

This post is my contribution to the Beyond the Cover: Books to Film Blogathon, hosted by Now Voyaging and Speakeasy.

There's a lot to cover (har-de-har), so get over to the hosts' sites and get reading!