Meet John Doe

Stanwyck causes a sensation with an invented newspaper story about a tramp promising to kill himself to protest at the state of the world - and then she auditions plain-speaking hick Gary Cooper for the part. His goodwill campaign takes the nation by storm, but proves ripe for political manipulation. After a bright start, this hunkers down to serious hand-wringing... Coop's hick (none too convincingly hinted at as the new Messiah) turns out to be a bore, and Capra strains to accommodate political chicanery and his own half-baked idealism.