If our current president finds himself with a spare hour and a half, he might get an inspirational kick out of this little-known 1933 political fantasy about a leader who blows straight through his political enemies to implement a highly aggressive agenda and save the world. Gabriel Over the White House is one of the more astonishing wish-fulfillment fables to come out of Depression-era Hollywood. You can't quite believe what you're watching even as you're watching it. Walter Huston, three years after he portrayed Abraham Lincoln on screen, plays the newly elected president, Jud Hammond. He's genial, ineffectual, an easily manipulated party hack to the core.
A near-fatal car wreck puts Hammond at death's door. Then, it's implied visually, the archangel Gabriel pays him a visit and the president emerges from his coma a very different man. The new Hammond is a born-again totalitarian, who places the country under martial law and ditches constitutionally decreed civil liberties. He solves his country's nagging crime and bootlegging crises the expedient if controversial way: by establishing presidential death squads. At one point, with the Statue of Liberty in the background, our hero's personal army executes a long row of ugly-looking gangsters by firing squad. Ultimately this leader brings about world peace -- tragic irony, given what was brewing in real life in 1933 -- by threatening the rest of the world's leaders with America's military.
Gabriel Over the White House came out shortly after the start of Roosevelt's first term in office. It speaks more to the depths of 1932 than to the winds of change that blew into town in '33. Hammond is a divinely inspired combination of Democratic, Republican, socialist and fascist ideals. His far-flung public works program predates FDR's New Deal. The death squads owe more to Hitler or Mussolini. Hammond is meant to be a politically incorrect man of action. He alone can save us.
"The way he thinks is so simple and honest that it sounds ... a little crazy," one Hammond adviser says. Another White House staff member answers with: "He's doing the things you wanted. And if he's mad, it's a divine madness."
Directed in a sort of fugue state by Gregory La Cava, who went on to make the sunnier Depression fantasy My Man Godfrey, Gabriel Over the White House is a little heavy on its feet. But watching it today, in this country, at this point in our nonfictional president's adventures in political upheaval, it's hard not to see how one era's desperation and frayed nerves connects to our own.
Our president's favorite film, he has often said, is Citizen Kane, a cautionary tale about a man lusting after fame, and wealth and the adoration of the public. It does not end happily. Nor does Gabriel Over the White House, which is barely known today. The folksy autocrat Jud Hammond grabs hold of a broken nation by any means necessary. If it takes the dismantling of the American political process to save us, so be it. In its chaotic ideological craziness, the movie feels like it could've been made tomorrow.
MovieStyle on 02/10/2017