December 19, 2016 --

(With LPR Christmas images from 2005. With many, many thanks to LPR's outstanding webmaster Terri Fassio and skullco.com.)

Christmastime has become the time for annual showings of Frank Capra's 1946 movie, "It's a Wonderful Life," whose climactic scene occurs on Christmas eve.

But "Wonderful Life" is not the only populist movie from Frank Capra that builds to a Christmas eve ending. Five years earlier, Capra's 1941 populist film "Meet John Doe, " also ended on a Christmas eve.

The earlier film, however, is more direct in its reference to Christmas. In "Meet John Doe," Long John Willoughby -- portrayed by Gary Cooper, a down-in-the-luck baseball player -- agrees to say that as "John Doe" he will protest
the ills of society by jumping off City Hall on Christmas eve. The threat began as a phony letter to the "Bulletin," written by reporter Ann MItchell, played by Barbara Stanwyck, to keep her job and to boost the newspaper's readership. Popular response to a John Doe radio talk, also written by reporter Mitchell, leads to the formation of John Doe clubs that Bulletin publisher D.B. Norton, played by Edward Arnold, hopes to use to gain political power. The radio talk, with a "love thy neighbor" theme, includes this reference to Christmas that LPR sees as a pretty good rebuke, today, to activists intent on ending Christmas celebrations. The quote is taken from the movie's screenplay by Robert Riskin, published in "Best American Screenplays," Sam Thomas, editor (Crown, 1986) p. 95.

"There's something swell about the spirit of Christmas, to see what it does to people, all kinds of people.... Now why can't that spirit, that same warm Christmas spirit last the whole year round? Gosh, if it ever did, if each and every John Doe would make that spirit last three hundred and sixty-five days out of the year, we'd develop such a strength, we'd create such a tidal wave of good will, that no human force could stand against it." To borrow from the movie's last line, delivered by "Bulletin" editor Henry Connell, played by James Gleason: "There you are, anti-Christmas crowd. The Christmas spirit! Try and lick that!"