Watching a Frank Capra film is a bit like drinking a light beer. It is not an unpleasant experience and it can be rather refreshing but it clearly does not have the finesse, subtlety and richness of the real thing.
So if you feel like sipping on patriotic, feel-good, we-are-all-wonderful-people-if-we-pull-together type messaging, Meet John Doe should about do it. Barbara Stanwyck pulls a fairly entertaining performance and Gary Cooper, who was nominated for an Oscar for this film (????) and ended up winning the Oscar that same year for Sergeant York, does what Gary Cooper usually does: be his stoic self and let his good looks and imposing stature do the rest.
Not for the cynics.

For anyone other than Ayn Rand herself, the idea of bringing her tedious and radical 1943 novel to the screen would have seemed a gargantuan and impossible task.

Rand’s novel about the powers of egoism and reason as the ultimate tools of human happiness is a laborious and fascinating read that packs enough philosophical verbosity to make any screenwriter cringe. How does one effectively condense 700 pages of philosophical discourse into a less than 2 hours film and still manages to keep the cinema audience entertained? How do you lead your actors to act like the ultimate reasoning and rational egoists (and therefore, by all traditional standards, with a high degree of coldness) without resorting to dull and expressionless simulating (Brad Pitt attempting to play a blasé vampire for instance)?
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With its ravishing black and white cinematography, this early and uncredited adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice is sexy and gritty and offers a fascinating look at Italy in the 40’s….

Sorry but i don’t get it. I am not going to make many friends in the film connoisseurs community by saying this, but the usual dose of exaggerations and over-the-top and unrealistic situations that come with many Powell/Pressburger films leave me cold, and, often, with a migraine as well.

Did the world ever design anything more beautiful than what was created in the US between 1930 and 1955? I tend to think not, at least not as part of a well-defined style as was the case with the Streamline Style of that period. The Streamline Style stood for mobility, speed, efficiency, luxury and hygiene, concepts that were all identified with modernity. It was also the symbol of mass consumption, which Americans were ready to embrace at the beginning of the 30s and after World War II. Once again, what fascinates me here is this embrace of a dream, this thirst to create the perfect city of the future, this belief that all will be well and that the times ahead will only bring prosperity and happiness. In addition, of course, to a design philosophy which appeals completely to my sense of aesthetics. People like Bell Geddes, Teague, Mendelsohn, Dreyfuss and Loewy tried to create a society where form and function would merge to create the most inspiring experiences.