Film Review: Gabriel Over the White House (1933)

Film Review: Gabriel Over the White House (1933) | Ecency

(source: tmdb.org)

Fascism is today considered to be one of the greatest evils in the world's history, and calling someone "fascist" is considered to be an insult. However, there was a time when fascism was just an ideology like any other, generally unburdened with the worst excesses of its practical application. As such, it had major appeal to various countries and social groups, even in places where you wouldn't normally expect it, such as Hollywood. An example could be provided by Gabriel Over the White House, a 1933 political drama directed by Gregory La Cava, known as the most explicitly fascist film ever to come from Hollywood.

The world in this film was being gripped by years of terrible and unending Great Depression and an unstoppable descent into misery, which made many embrace various alternatives to traditional capitalism and democracy. The film was based on Rinehard: A Melodrama of the Nineteen-Thirties, a novel by British author Thomas F. Tweed, an advisor to former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George whose character and policies during the First World War inspired the plot. The main character, played by Walter Huston, is an affable but corrupt American politician, Judson "Judd" Hammond, who has just been elected as US President at the height of the Great Depression. He doesn't take his job very seriously, feeling obligated to corrupt politicians who engineered his election and offers nothing but empty slogans when asked what he would do to tackle rising unemployment, poverty and gangland crime on the streets. Everything changes after he recklessly decides to drive the presidential limousine, which ends with an accident that would put him in a coma. When he wakes up, he is a completely changed man with a clear agenda and intentions to use his presidential powers to tackle the country's problems regardless of the cost. First, he fires his entire cabinet, then he offers a comprehensive programme of social benefits for the masses of starving unemployed who have marched on Washington. The US Congress isn't happy and wants to have him impeached, but Hammond reacts by proclaiming martial law and forcing Congress to adjourn itself. Then, when a conflict with previously untouched gangsters becomes violent, he reacts by sending a special federal police force to take out the gangsters before the survivors are brought to court martial and summarily shot. Hammond then switches his attention to international affairs, forcing countries of the world to pay off World War I-era debts to the USA and engage in a comprehensive programme of disarmament that would usher in a new era of world peace and prosperity.

Gabriel Over the White House was produced by Walter Wanger, one of the more colourful personalities in Hollywood history, but the real force behind the film was William Randolph Hearst, a powerful media tycoon whose influence at the 1932 Democratic National Convention secured the nomination of presidential candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt and, later, helped his election. Hearst was Roosevelt's great supporter (who would turn against him in later years), and the film's script in many ways reflected Hearst's own ideas about what the upcoming Roosevelt presidency should look like. Although finished shortly after the election, its premiere was held until Roosevelt's inauguration. The President had seen the film and was, by all accounts, enthusiastic about its fictional counterpart, with some of his early speeches even using some of Hammond's phrases. The American public also liked the film, and it had decent box office numbers. However, it relatively quickly faded into obscurity and is now considered one of the least known big-budget Hollywood films of its time.

The film's obscurity has little to do with its technical merits. Gregory La Cava directs the film confidently and with a good pace. Some of the optical effects in the film look rough around the edges, and the use of documentary stock footage in some scenes wouldn't go unnoticed by an experienced eye, but Gabriel Over the White House is still within the high-quality standards of 1930s Hollywood. That also goes for the acting. Canadian actor Walter Huston, best known as the father of famous director John Huston, had played another US President, Abraham Lincoln, in an eponymous film three years earlier and puts that experience to good use here. Two of the characters seem a little bit redundant – Hammond's idealistic secretary Harold "Beek" Beekman (played by Franchot Tone) and Hammond's "personal assistant" Pendola "Pendie" Molloy (played by Karen Morley). They provide some melodrama, and Pendie serves as an illustration of Hammond's transformation from her presumably lecherous boss into an almost saintly figure, which is, according to Pendie, touched by a divine spark.

The real reason for the obscurity of this film lies in its political message, which was controversial in its time and is (or is supposed to be) unacceptable now. Gabriel Over the White House tackles almost all major problems of America and the world at the time and offers a relatively simple solution in the form of a single Man of Destiny who would act decisively, with little regard for the rule of law or diplomatic niceties. And he succeeds in doing so, achieving in a matter of months what the real-life America tried and mostly failed to do in subsequent decades. Roosevelt might have been flattered and even initially tempted by the recipes provided by this film, but the US constitutional system and political realities of the "big tent" political coalition prevented him from going the path prescribed by this film. Other leaders in the world weren't constrained. The premiere of this film came shortly after Hitler's rise to power in Germany, and the first moves of the new German Chancellor mimicked Hammond's policies with disturbing precision – the Enabling Acts, the Night of the Long Knives, and a cavalier attitude to international obligations and, ultimately, an attempt to create a thousand-year new world order, which ended with catastrophically worse results than in this Hollywood film. Gabriel Over the White House is a very disturbing film that shows that some dangerous ideas can find fertile ground when you don't initially expect it and, in light of some recent events like pandemics and wars, is perhaps even more disturbing now than ninety years ago.

RATING: 6/10 (++)