Gabriel Over the White House

Anyone with an interest in American history or politics should see this--if you can find it! It's a fantasy about a political hack who is elected president during the Depression, who is transformed by an angel after an auto accident into a national savior--the perfect president, from a 1933 point of view. The result is just a bit scary. The fact that this movie came out during FDR's first few months in office makes it particularly interesting. It reveals a lot about what America was looking for then--and what it may be looking for today.

While I was living in Madrid, the Filmoteca showed both the American version and the little-seen European version of this. My memory is a little hazy, but the European version was by far the more interesting of the two: firstly Hammond is seen to go just that much further into fascism; and secondly, rather than have him nobly struck down at the end, Pendie actually chooses NOT to save him, because she sees what he has become. I've yet to find anything written about this other version though. I think we should be told...

I call this a precode in an unusual sense of the term. "Precode" usually drums up visions of movies like "Baby Face" and "The Divorcée" - films filled with sexually controversial situations and language for that period of time (1928-1934). However, precode was more than this. It also involved political ideas that were over the top and the existential doubts that made the fine horror films of Universal Studios in the early 30's. This film is definitely a political precode. The censors would have never allowed such a film to be released just 18 months later. At this point I quote Wikipedia, which gives some context for the film:

"Filmed during the 1932 presidential election on the orders of media magnate William Randolph Hearst, the film was intended to be an instructional guide for Franklin D. Roosevelt during his presidency. Hammond as he exists prior to his accident is an amalgamation of caricatures of Presidents Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, Roosevelt's immediate predecessors. After his accident, he is Hearst's idealized image of the perfect president, the president he wanted Roosevelt to be."

Hearst always had great sway at MGM, with him also directing the career of his mistress, Marion Davies, at that same studio. President Judd Hammond in his "idealized" form is much more of a fascist than a socialist, though, declaring martial law and putting people in charge of trials because they have a grudge against the defendant. It is also interesting that Pres. Hammond after his transformation not only has a new interest in the welfare of the citizens, but he is rendered sexually neutral, addressing his former mistress as Miss rather than by her first name. It is like Judd Hammond has had some supernatural being possess his body more than it seems that Hammond has had some kind of transformation of his own world view.

Definitely recommended. I don't think I've ever seen a film quite like it.

GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE (1933) is a movie that really tests the viewers' ideals about government and democracy. Is it meant to be inspirational? Aspirational? Frightening? A cautionary tale? It's certainly a movie that makes viewers think.

Walter Huston plays Judd Hammond, newly elected President of the United States. The country is in the midst of an economic Depression, with millions out of work and starving, but President Hammond is happy to enjoy the comforts of his position while serving as a pawn of his political party. He has no intentions of fulfilling campaign promises or reforming the country. One character notes, "The right man in the White House can bring us out of despair, into prosperity again." It is clear that Judd Hammond is not the right man.

But after a serious head injury, the President is reborn as a crusader for the greatest good. He takes action to help his suffering people, firing any cabinet members that stand in his way.

The President could be suffering from some sort of brain damage, or perhaps Judd Hammond's body is being possessed by the angel Gabriel, God's messenger to the people. But, as Franchot Tone's character points out, is not Gabriel a messenger of Wrath?

The new President Hammond starts as an idealistic reformer, but ultimately transforms the United States government into a Machiavellian dictatorship, complete with firing squads. Everything the President does is for the good of the people, but the ends cannot always justify the means. He supports the unemployed masses, promising to stimulate the economy and bring back prosperity. But when he meets opposition on Capitol Hill, he dissolves Congress and takes sole control of the government under martial law.

To combat gangsterism, the President repeals Prohibition and establishes government-funded liquor stores. Violent resistance from the gangsters is seen as a declaration of war on the United States and a special police army is created to wipe out the racketeering scum.

It's unclear how director Gregory La Cava wants the audience to feel about President Hammond. On the one hand, he is a champion of the people, fighting for the common man and getting results. But he is destroying the American democratic system in the process. Senators are outraged when the President threatens to dissolve Congress, and rightly so. Yet characters speak in great admiration of the President after he bullies the nations of the world into accepting his vision for international peace.

Coming at a time when Americans looked to their leaders for help, GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE might have been a Depression-era fantasy, giving audiences the strong political leader of their dreams. Or it might have been a caution of the slippery slope of government involvement. The film is fascinating and controversial from a modern vantage point. The economic stimulus idea has gained some relevance in recent years, though the shadows of the fascism and Nazism to come in that decade are unsettling to see (especially portrayed in the United States).

Gabriel Over The White House comes to the movie going public, courtesy of William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan Productions, at a very special time in history when there was grave worry as to whether America and the capitalist system would survive. What producer Hearst is telling us is how he feels that the Deity if he intervened would solve all our problems.

Walter Huston is our star/protagonist here, a newly elected president who is no Franklin D. Roosevelt, but rather more of a Warren Harding type. Catch Huston offering up the usual political pablum at his press conference in terms of what to do about the Depression. It's rather depressing. Later on at his cabinet meeting some issue about an appointment comes up and he just remarks that if you boys in the cabinet and party feel this way, who is he to question it.

But then our president who the Secret Service would NEVER let get behind the wheel of a car totals the White House limousine and goes into a coma from the concussion. It's at that point Huston gets a heavenly intervention into his nature and starts enacting policies, presumably that God and William Randolph Hearst would approve, not necessarily in that order.

Huston makes first an amiable nonentity and then a stern statesman in the White House. It's like he's playing two different parts and in fact that's precisely the point of the film.

Besides economic want, folks in 1932-33 were very much concerned about the rise of lawlessness, organized criminal gangs that grew out of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution. A lot of what Huston does could be construed as worse than the disease in terms of civil liberties. Repealing Prohibition was something only a few wackos like Alfred E. Smith wanted and Smith was Hearst's mortal political enemy.

From the man who couldn't wait to get to war in Cuba in 1898, William Randolph Hearst had become a pacifist and an advocate for disarmament and he proves it by going farther than either the Washington or London conferences on that subject. Adolph Hitler was on the verge of becoming Germany's Chancellor at the time Gabriel Over The White House came out, someone like him wasn't factored into the equation for world peace.

All in the name of peace, prosperity, and the coming millenia and since it's all directed from heaven, we don't and aren't supposed to question it. The perfect world in the mind of William Randolph Hearst.

Gabriel Over The White House tells us a lot about America midst the Depresssion, our hopes, fears, and aspirations. And it offers the more authoritarian method of attaining those aspirations. It's an entertaining film, but it's more a psycho-political picture of the USA at that point in our history.