Frank Capra, Meet John Doe Movie Review Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Frank Capra, Meet John Doe - Movie Review Example Keeping in mind public reaction, power players got involved in realization of John Doe project, picking out a man ready to play the role for money and disappear at the right moment. However, the â€Å"actor† eventually realizes the scale of social manipulations and sets himself against his puppeteers. The movie vibrantly reflects the topic of social manipulation and power play, vesting it in the settings of contemporary New York and then the entire America. Here, I would like to mention Harry Cooper’s brilliant acting – to my thinking, Capra chose a perfect man to embody the image of John Doe, the symbol of protests against rotten social order. The topic that was most vividly illustrated in the Meet John Doe movie is definitely the role of mass media in public conscience and its ambiguous nature. No invention can be exclusively positive or negative by its nature – it only has potential. Mass media is an example of such invention depicted in the movie. On one hand, newspapers and radio plat and grow the idea in minds of thousands of people – good idea celebrating unity and mutual respect among â€Å"average† citizens. On the other hand, it is mass media that distort this idea, convert it to the use of political campaigns and make the adherents abandon John Doe’s ideas. Here, on the example of Ann Mitchel and others, a narrower topic of journalist ethics is raised. At the same time, the ideas professed by John Doe are rather close to biblical ones, reminding average people of general human morality – Mitchell encourages them via Willoughby’s voice on the radio to help and unite with their neighbors, implying that such average people are the nation, not the politicians. The movie is an absolute masterpiece despite the fact that it wasn’t fully appreciated after release in 1941. Classical work of the world’s cinema,