Gabriel Over the White House - 1933

Gabriel Over the White House (1933) is an inventive fantasy and apparently, political commentary as well, that has resonance today.  What exactly the meaning or purpose of that commentary is never entirely clear, as there is a great deal of contradiction in ideals presented, and perhaps even a curious display of a lack of knowledge about civics and our political institutions.  There is no innocence about human nature, though, and this was a hallmark of Pre-Code films.  The tone of the movie is sly and sometimes hits hard.

Walter Huston is splendid as the lead, a newly inaugurated president taking the helm of the government during the worst of the early Great Depression years.  He is a freewheeling bachelor, romps with his young nephew played by Dickie Moore as though he were a child himself, and when a sexy, confident, coy woman stops by the White House to see him, he keeps his door open to her and makes up a staff job for her to keep her close.  We already know, even without Franchot Tone’s knowing look, that “Pendie,” played by Karen Morely, is Mr. Huston’s mistress.  He does not trouble to hide it.

Franchot Tone plays Huston’s secretary and presumably chief of staff.  The movie treats what we know about Oval Office appointments with a vague bending of the truth, even as Huston bends the rules, and that is a script writer’s device to funnel the audience into the story he wants to tell without being bogged down by factual details.  Since the movie is frankly a fantasy, there is no need to hold to the mundane facts about actual protocol or how government really works.

But the era is faithfully depicted—if not in a real timeline of events, rather, in the feelings of desperation of a demoralized populace, in angry crowds, in hopelessness.  In such desperate times as these, Walter Huston as president does not seem to be the right man for the job.  He is self-involved, somewhat immature, gleefully corrupt and easily manipulated by special interests, and sometimes astonishingly stupid, which may be the source of his callousness.  Given the actual quill pen (which was NOT the actual pen) that Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation to sign a new bill for a public works project for new sewers in Puerto Rico, Huston jokes flippantly about it, “Well, here goes for Puerto Rican garbage.”  He is coarse, but we may smile at his impishness.  On the other hand, one cannot help but think of another asinine president who threw rolls of paper towels at suffering Puerto Ricans.  He is also immature, gleefully corrupt and easily manipulated by special interests, and sometimes astonishingly stupid.

Mischa Auer plays a serious and disgusted reporter who tries to nail down the details of Huston’s platform, but there are none.  (I half expected Mr. Auer to break into a passionate verse of “Ochi Chornya,” but he’s saving that for director Gregory La Cava’s other movie, My Man Godfrey, which we discussed here.)

However, a change will soon come over the new president.  Huston rides in a short motorcade to an event, but he takes the wheel because he loves to drive himself.  Fast.  Enjoying the white-knuckled response of his Secret Service men, he floors it, trying to pull away from the rest of the staff and police escort in the car behind him, swerving on a winding country highway.  Finally, he loses control and the car flips over.  He is severely injured and near death.

He is kept in seclusion by his doctor for many days, and the public is kept in the dark about the nature of his injuries or details of the accident.  There is some worry about who will take over the reins of government—seemingly unaware that that is precisely why we have vice presidents.

Finally, Huston comes out of his coma—but he is a changed man.  Now serious, now intelligent, now with a sense of purpose.  Franchot Tone and Karen Morely see the change, and notice something supernatural about it.  Huston has been visited by the Angel Gabriel, who is now pulling the strings in Huston’s brain.

Restored to more vigor than he had before, Huston sets about curing the Depression, first by addressing a group of protestors—not unlike the Bonus Army, whose camp was burned out and members shot by Douglas MacArthur’s troops under President Herbert Hoover.

Then he single-handedly repeals the Eighteenth Amendment, getting rid of Prohibition, just as Congress would do under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but he also establishes government liquor stores to drive out the gangster bootleggers, who bomb the stores.  C. Henry Gordon (in one of an astonishing fourteen movies that year) is compelling as the smooth, sinister mobster in a few devilishly sneering closeups.  Huston fires his cabinet, gets rid of Congress, declares martial law, and has the mobsters shot by firing squad.

In his address, Huston declares that he is a dictator based on Thomas Jefferson’s ideas of democracy.  Here is obviously one of the ridiculous twists in logic, but Huston would not be the first politician, real or fake, then or now, to claim that his fascist intentions would have been applauded by the Founding Fathers. 

Franchot Tone and Karen Morely, meantime, have become romantically involved, but they need not worry about offending Huston.  He has bigger fish to fry, and the Angel Gabriel keeps him pretty busy.   Miss Morely is shot by racketeers, but recovers and Huston blesses their union.

Another bizarre and even troubling move by Huston is when he brings the world powers together during a radio broadcast to demonstrate his new military service—the United States Navy of the Air.  He will move for disarmament of former weapons, but will put billions into the military of the future, which apparently is going to be biplanes, whose pilots will pull a lever and drop a bomb on an enemy ship.  Huston arranges a demonstration, and bullies the foreign governments into paying their World War loans and reparations and promise not to rearm because if they do, we will fly biplanes over them and pull a lever and drop a bomb. 

He tells them and the radio microphones, “The next war will be the story of the failure of antiquated weapons and antiquated myths, of the horrifying destructiveness of the modern agencies of modern arms.  Armies and navies will be destroyed from the air.  And as these planes destroy armies and navies, they will destroy cities, they will destroy populations…the next war will depopulate the earth…invisible gasses, inconceivably devasting explosives.”  Well, he got that right, in part at least. The foreign leaders hurriedly agree to his Washington Covenant.

Now that the important work is done, the Angel Gabriel passes over Huston as in a shadow, and Huston dies.

Even more interesting than the twisting logic of this film, are the sometimes conflicting stories about it.  We know it had its genesis in a novel, but producer Walter Wanger, Democrat and Roosevelt supporter, brought the story to M-G-M head Louis B. Mayer, staunch Republican, under Wanger’s production company owned by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.  Hearst began his unsuccessful political career, including a failed bid for the presidency in 1904, as a Democrat, but as the years rolled by he became more conservative and isolationist, who supported Hitler and the Nazi Party.  Though he was an early Roosevelt supporter, he went to the dark side after 1934 and became his enemy.  We all know he was the prototype for Charles Foster Kane of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1940), but that’s another story.  It is reported that Mr. Mayer held the movie back until after Roosevelt’s inauguration, hoping to pin the stain of fascism on him, rather than on Hoover, as if the story is an examination of the current sitting president.

The political affiliations of these men have a lot to do with any discussion of Gabriel Over the White House today, and because production began during the Hoover administration, but was released just weeks after Roosevelt came into office, what is the message of the film?  Who is the finger of fascism being pointed at—the Democrats or the Republicans, and is dictatorial powers in an American President considered fascism at all, or is it merely what Thomas Jefferson would have liked and what the American people secretly want all along?  Was the film an effort to ingratiate fascism with the American people?  We know only that the movie disappeared quickly enough when by the mid 1930s, fascism appeared to be a clear and present danger at home and abroad.  There were no nice guy dictators.

We are living now in far more dangerous times, and the plot points or message—if there really is any message at all—in Gabriel Over the White House seem innocent in their supposing, though intriguing, and the finger-pointing at what it all means is irrelevant.  What it is, is fantasy in its purest form.  Any good story, fantasy or not, begins with “what if?” and this is a freedom of thought we should celebrate. 

What I admire about many films of the 1930s is the courageous introspection into their own contemporary times, warts and all, and experimenting with different ways of storytelling to do that. The escapist musicals have, I think, sometimes received the lion’s share of attention when movies of the 1930s are recalled as “getting us through the Depression.”  The black-and-white gritty and even grim films of the Dirty Thirties have special historical value, and in their own way, they got us through the Depression, too.

As much as I can this year, I’d like to examine more films of the 1930s that unselfconsciously illustrate their own times. 

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

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