Shaved by a drunken barber

Meet John Doe

(1941)

How many movies do you suppose there have been about Jesus? Hell, Capra himself made one five years before this, and another one two years before this, and another five years later, and this has elements of all of those. But part of what makes this inferior to those is just how doggone literal he gets about this one. "You don't have to die to keep the John Doe ideal alive," Barbara Stanwyck's character pleads in the big rooftop scene. "Someone already died for that once. The first John Doe. And he's kept that ideal alive for nearly 2,000 years. It was he who kept it alive in them. And he'll go on keeping it alive for ever and always--for every John Doe movement these men kill, a new one will be born. That's why those bells are ringing, John. They're calling to us, not to give up but to keep on fighting, to keep on pitching."

Good god, as it were.