Despite its cloying, Capraesque title, Gabriel Over the White House is in fact one of the more disturbing movies to come out of classic Hollywood. Released in the early days of the Franklin Roosevelt Presidency, and financed by the near fanatic Roosevelt supporter William Randolph Hearst, the film is a sort of plea for an (benevolent) American Dictatorship. Walter Huston plays Judson C. 'Judd' "The Major" Hammond, and opens on his inauguration day. It is the middle of the Great Depression, and President Hammond has made a lot of campaign promises about how he is going to fight it, but in reality he's just an ineffectual, mildly corrupt, partisan hack whose in office merly to serve party and corporate interests. Hammond's long time personal secretary/implied Mistress Pendola Molloy (played by real life leftist/McCarthy victim Karen Morley) appeals to Hammond to use the office he has found himself in to do some real good for the people.Hammond instead carries on in Hoover/Harding mode until he is in a major car accident while teasingly trying to get away from some reporters. Hammond of course survives but is rendered comatose and his long time personal physician Dr. Eastman (Samuel S. Hinds) is sure that he will not pull through. Yet miraculously he does.
Weeks after the accident Hammond comes out of the coma, looks up at a mysterious light only he can see, and becomes a different man. In short order he meets with a group of unemployed veterans he had been putting off before and comes up with a plan to draft them all into a sort of public works corp. His cabinet doesn't like this so he sacks them, Congress doesn't like this so he dissolves them. Hammond also repeals prohibition, but sets up the government as the sole licensed dispenser of alcohol, infuriating organized crime as embodied by the notorious mobster 'Nick Diamond' (C. Henry Gordon), and we haven't even gotten yet to his plan to blackmail the globe into disarmament and world peace. In short Hammond becomes an unstable dictator with delusions (or as the film implies non-delusions) of divine sanction. It was maybe half way through the movie before I was hopping that someone, probably Hammond's personal assistant Hartley "Beek" Beekman (Franchot Tone) would take him out, this of course is not to be.
Gabriel Over the White House is a very strange movie, its Fascism Lite. It made me uncomfortable, and kind of angry. Never the less, I think its worth seeing, if only just to marvel at its oddness. **
You can watch it free here.
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