With the economy in collapse and millions out of work during the Great Depression, a few Hollywood thrillers proposed radical political changes. William Randolph Hearst was the impetus behind this bizarre tale of a President ‘possessed by an Angel’ who assumes dictatorial powers. The Cabinet and Congress are pushed aside, labor camps are set up for the unemployed, and the crime problem is easily solved: gangsters are summarily executed by an extra-legal court. Foreign nations are promised violence if our demands aren’t met. Walter Huston, Karen Morley and Franchot Tone star in this polished fantasy of political delirium.

Gabriel Over the White House
Blu-ray
Warner Archive Collection
1933 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 86, 102 min. / Street Date January 28, 2025 / Available at MovieZyng / 21.99
Starring: Walter Huston, Karen Morley, Franchot Tone, Arthur Byron, Dickie Moore, C. Henry Gordon, David Landau, Samuel S. Hinds, Jean Parker, Mischa Auer.
Cinematography: Bert Glennon
Art Director: Cedric Gibbons
Gowns by: Adrian
Film Editor: Basil Wrangell
Assistant Director: Joseph M. Newman
Original Music: Dr. William Axt
Screen Play by Carey Wilson from the book Rinehard: A Melodrama of the Nineteen-Thirties by T. F. Tweed
Produced by William Randolph Hearst, Walter Wanger
Directed by Gregory La Cava

The Warner Archive Collection has remastered a vintage classic, Hollywood’s strangest political fantasy. The pre-Code Gabriel Over the White House didn’t show up on old broadcast TV very often. It likely was not suppressed — TV stations probably received feedback from viewers: “Where did you get that crazy movie?”  We’ll try to be level-headed about the show’s content, which fits in with the turbulent time it was made. Good research has answered some questions about how it came to be filmed.

 

Is this fictional 1932 anything like our real 2025? 

Unstable times in America have produced some pretty strange political-religious message pictures. The HUAC-blacklist period takes the prize for weirdness, with  My Son John,  The Next Voice You Hear and  Red Planet Mars. Twenty years earlier, the tense political changeover from Herbert Hoover to Franklin Delano Roosevelt inspired this jaw-dropper. It was produced by liberal Walter Wanger for conservative William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Pictures. Horrified by Gabriel’s political content, MGM’s Louis B. Mayer delayed its release until Herbert Hoover left office, in an attempt to avoid awkward associations.

That winter was said to be the darkest of the Great Depression. No federal insurance for bank deposits caused the personal savings of ordinary investors to be wiped out. With the collapse of the economy thousands of WW1 veterans marched on Washington to demand relief. Fears of revolution were being taken seriously. Newspaper editorials predicted disaster.

 

Adapted from an obscure English book, Gabriel Over the White House is a fantasy incitement for the overthrow of the U.S. government by a ‘benevolent dictator.’ It recommends that America be ruled by a President deriving his power ‘directly from the people,’ the Fascist system already in place in Italy and just coming to power in Germany. Radical sentiments were common in 1932. Many Americans welcomed the notion of a strong man to come along and set things right. But the film goes a step further, by mixing its message with a religious fantasy. This dictator is heavenly inspired.

Screenwriter Carey Wilson (Love Finds Andy Hardy, The Red Danube) sketches a United States in disarray. The newly elected President Judson Hammond (Walter Huston) is a political hack and an irresponsible playboy. With Americans starving, he avoids taking action on pressing issues. John Bronson, the populist leader of the ‘Army of the Unemployed’ (David Landau) is leading thousands of men on a march to Washington to demand relief. The notorious racketeer Nick Diamond (C. Henry Gordon) continues to flaunt Prohibition laws. Hammond dismisses both as ‘local problems.’ He would rather read detective magazines and drive his Presidential limousine at high speeds. Judson’s cronies don’t care that President Hammond’s assistant Pendie Molloy (Karen Morley) is also his lover.

 

Both Pendie and first secretary ‘Beek’ Beekman (Franchot Tone) are horrified when their boss crashes the Presidential limousine at over 100 mph. Death seems imminent, but then Hammond awakes from his coma, energized by some kind of spiritual transformation. No longer interested in personal pleasures, Hammond dedicates himself tirelessly to the responsibilities of his office. He puts the unemployed to work by creating an official ‘Army of Constructions,’ a work corps for public projects. Amazed by the President’s fiery determination, Pendie and Beek can’t decide if he’s insane, or if he’s possessed by the spirit of the Angel Gabriel. Either way they are thrilled to see the former political opportunist using his political power to cure America’s ills.

At the first sign of resistance, Hammond breaks with his old party cronies. He eventually dismisses his entire cabinet. When Congress threatens impeachment, he declares martial law, shuts down the legislature and assumes dictatorial authority. When Hammond announces plans to end criminal racketeering, Nick Diamond responds with a terror attack against his administration. A special ‘Federal Police’ force is formed outside the legal system to arrest gangsters and try them in military courts martial. Hammond then turns to balancing the budget. His foreign policy is America First all the way. With a show of military force, he threatens our European and Asian allies, telling them to pay their debts from World War One — or else.

 

Night of the Living Dead President. 

The policies pursued by the ‘inspired’ President Hammond are an ideological mix: he favors socialist programs but is a strict isolationist.  The most radical idea in Gabriel Over the White House is its uniquely American mix of political will and religious faith. There’s no ambiguity in Hammond’s change of character: the Angel Gabriel possesses the near-dead President in a spiritual takeover represented by a plaintive trumpet, a gust of wind and a change of lighting. As in a naïve religious play, God seizes the government to do what needs to be done. And as every dangerous zealot knows in his heart of hearts, There’s No Law Against What’s Right.

The clarity of the Warner Archive’s new video remaster reveals subtle details in Walter Huston’s miraculously ‘reenergized’ President Hammond. His face is pale and drawn, and makeup adds ‘hollow’ marks to his cheeks. The suggestion is that Hammond is indeed a Holy Zombie. The Angel Gabriel possesses Hammond’s body much like an alien from paranoid ’50s Sci-fi thrillers. He’s an  Invisible Invader, a corpse given life to ‘cure’ America and put it on a God-approved standing.

 

Gregory La Cava’s sharp direction draws a strong contrast between the before- and after- versions of Judson Hammond. The newly-elected party shill can’t locate Siam on a map, and doesn’t care. He plays with his nephew while ignoring grave economic news on the radio. His speeches offer meaningless slogans about America picking itself up by its bootstraps in the tradition of Valley Forge, etc..

Making carefree jokes about the power of his office, Hammond ignores the humanist plea of Thieson, a reporter from a liberal paper. Thieson is played uncredited by Mischa Auer, who director La Cava will later cast as a comic Bolshevick in his classic screwball comedy  My Man Godfrey.

The post- accident President Hammond is a different man altogether. He cuts off amorous ties with Pendie. He demands kingly respect from his old cronies and fires those that resist his orders. His press conferences shock the world with bold and radical policy statements. The ‘new’ President Hammond makes a stirring speech about his concern for the welfare of common citizens. He tells the delighted Thieson that he wants to be quoted.

The ‘normal’ President Hammond appears to be a critique of Herbert Hoover, who was accused of being an out-of-touch do-nothing. Hoover frequently offered homilies themed to his personal passion, fishing, and declared that “economic depression cannot be cured by legislative action or executive pronouncement.”  The ‘transformed’ President Hammond is a vision of a rogue demagogue, reshaping America with radical reforms and new federal departments … the exact reasons that the American money establishment would soon condemn President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In 1932, a ‘Bonus Army’ of unemployed WW1 veterans had marched on Washington, demanding relief; city police and the U.S. Cavalry routed them from their camps in actions that turned violent. In the film, the newly-beatified Hammond meets the ‘Army of the Unemployed’ in their camp and puts them on his side with prayers an (socialist?) oratory. His ‘Army of Constructions’ public works program proposes to house millions of men away from their families, in barracks-like tent cities. Hammond’s plan has similarities with the real-life  Conservation Corps, one of F.D.R’s biggest successes.

 

The New Democracy is a
‘Dictatorship in the Name of the Majority.’ 

President Hammond’s other acts are more in line with those of Adolf Hitler. He suspends Civil Rights and imposes martial law by pure presidential fiat. Also like Hitler, Hammond seizes the authority to arrest and execute ‘enemies of the people’ as he sees fit to define them. We expect that a Depression-era politician would identify gangsterism as an evil to be rooted out. Lawlessness affects the national morale. Hammond claims to have no problem with immigrants, but he focuses the country’s fears about organized crime on a gang overseen by … a depraved immigrant. Nick Diamond can be denied his status as an American with rights be cause he’s swarthy and has an unpleasant foreign accent.

Hammond’s draconian ‘War On Crime’ prefigures the political science fiction of later paranoid conspiracy films like  The Manchurian Candidate. Viewers in 1933 must have been shocked by the Diamond gang’s drive-by shooting at the White House which leaves both a security guard and poor Pendie riddled with machine gun bullets. Hammond makes his secretary Beekman the commanding officer of the new ‘Federal Police,’ complete with a military uniform. Beekman hands down death sentences like an inquisitor overseeing a Star Chamber, in a show trial resembling those designed to please a Stalin, a Hitler or a Chairman Mao. Beekman uses his verdict speech to praise the leadership of the all-wise President Hammond.

 

America First means threatening other countries. 

President Hammond also reserves the right to bully America’s allies.  He gathers the ambassadors of America’s debtor countries for a demonstration of air power,  Billy Mitchell- style. He first lectures the deadbeat foreigners for defaulting on their war debts while spending to build new armies and navies. It’s rather prophetic to see the Japanese ambassador Baron Kenzo (uncredited Teru Shimada, much later of  You Only Live Twice) watching Hammond’s dive-bombers sink some captured German battleships… in what way is Japan one of these ‘debtor nations?’  Hammond then proceeds with a stirring description of future wars, which he predicts will be fought with invisible gases, unimaginably powerful explosives (!) and Death Rays (!!!). It’s an unmistakable ‘or else’ ultimatum. The ambassadors are stunned into acquiescence.

Sci-fi predictions aside, Hammond’s claims are a gross exaggeration of America’s military superiority in 1933. Our armed forces were technologically behind the times. Hammond cows the foreign states into disarmament at a time when some of the countries represented were ahead of us in the development of modern navies and air forces.

 

Hammond’s isolationist, exceptionalist credo preaches that America must stop being a patsy nation, stop being pushed around by the rest of the world. He panders to that portion of the public eager to believe that America’s foreign aid is simple robbery. As in a right-wing power fantasy, Gabriel Over the White House does not consider the rights of other nations, which the authors think should be subservient to the United States on every political issue.

The source book, and things dropped from the Gabriel Preview Cut.In his book  Hollywood Censored  Gregory D. Black writes that the source book for Gabriel Over the White House is actually futuristic Science Fiction. It takes place at a remove from Depression politics, in the then-distant future of 1950. ^* Co-producer William Randolph Hearst wanted the ‘inspired madman’ President Hammond to resemble F.D.R..  MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, a conservative Republican, found the shooting script “wildly reactionary and radical to the nth degree.” After seeing a preview cut Mayer thought the pre-transformed President Hammond was much too critical of the Herbert Hoover administration.

Changes were ordered. Speeches that sounded too much like Hoover’s ‘prosperity is just around the corner’ slogans were cut. New scenes showed Pendie becoming engaged to Beek, to neutralize the presidential hanky-panky problem. The re-cut softened President Hammond’s speech to the assembled ambassadors. As filmed, Hammond’s ultimatum had been even more direct — unless the foreign nations paid up, he originally vowed to build an enormous air force and bomb them into submission.

All in all, 15 minutes were removed from the preview cut of Gabriel Over the White House.  A bizarre original ending was eliminated altogether (spoiler):

President Hammond collapses after signing his International Peace Accord. As he lies near death, the Angel Gabriel departs and Hammond reverts back to his original personality. He repudiates the giant changes he’s made. He tells his party cronies that he’ll cancel his national recovery edicts and foolish foreign treaties, and get things back to business as usual. Before he can speak to the public or do anything official, Hammond collapses one last time. Realizing that all of Hammond’s ‘good works’ are in jeopardy, Pendie purposely withholds the President’s medicine. He dies.

 

Gregory D. Black reports that censor Will Hays encouraged MGM to play up the idea of divine intervention, to emphasize that the President was possesed by an Angel. Hays also had a scene removed in which the President and his cronies play poker in a smoky ‘back room.’ All of these retakes were done in great haste. The President’s direct threat of war was the first piece to go — MGM did not want to antagonize its European distributors.

The film review in the magazine The Nation was entitled ‘Fascism over Hollywood.’  Other reviews simply called the film unconvincing or naïve. Gabriel Over the White House soon became another forgotten political anomaly of film history. The only ’30s Hollywood film that is even vaguely similar in concept is another from Walter Wanger, 1934’s  The President Vanishes.  A President working to keep the U.S. out of a European war is kidnapped, perhaps by a group of businessmen and bankers that want to profit from arms sales. Wanger’s second White House thriller did not frame its politics in a religious context. Filmed under the Production Code, it was subjected to numerous censor changes. The Catholic Legion of Decency decreed it ‘immoral.’

The only other Hollywood feature to exceed Gabriel’s Christian political-spiritual delirium is 1952’s  Red Planet Mars. It proposes that God lives on Mars, plain and simple. God’s radio messages overthrow Communism and bring us all a future of peace and harmony. America becomes an official Christian theocracy.

How much relevance the fantasy of Gabriel Over the White House has to today’s politics is a matter of interpretation. Just the same, its extremes will leave armchair politicos with their mouths hanging open. It’s well-written, well-acted and crisply directed. Walter Huston, Karen Morley and Franchot Tone are excellent. Were actor C. Henry Gordon fat-faced instead of lean, he’d be a dead ringer for Al Capone.

The movie displays some fancy montage editing but is mostly content to film things straight on — especially Walter Huston’s commanding oratory. Beyond his better-known triumphs in  All that Money Can Buy and  The Treasure of Sierra Madre, Huston played U.S. presidents in D.W. Griffith’s biographical  Abraham Lincoln, and the Science Ficion film  Transatlantic Tunnel.

In his  2003 TCM article, Jeff Stafford wrote that the movie was one of the biggest box office hits of 1933, and that Walter Huston thought it helped his film career:

“Walter Huston was always partial to Gabriel Over the White House since it ended up securing him an invitation to the White House for drinks with President Roosevelt, who was a big fan of the film.

 

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The Warner Archive Collection’s Blu-ray of Gabriel Over the White House rejuvenates a gem of a thriller that no longer plays like a filmic fossil. Was this negative specially preserved?  The pale images and weak audio of old prints give way to solid values and a strong soundtrack. The stable image displays rich contrast and fine grain. Even the rear-projection scenes look better. The improved remaster reveals matte work previously unnoticed, on the White House grounds and on board the ship for the meeting of ambassadors.

We’re also impressed by the interiors of MGM’s White House. The gangster ‘Nick Diamond,’ dressed up to meet with the President in what he thinks is diplomatic attire, poses under a painting of Teddy Roosevelt … in a room we’ve seen represented many times in  The West Wing, produced 70 years later.

 

For extras, the WAC presents two animated Loony Tunes and one Merrie Melodies from the same year as the main feature. They’re plenty bizarre, and appear to be newly remastered. Bosko in Person stars Bosko, a caricature of a black boy as a vaudeville entertainer, dancing with his girlfriend Honey. By this time Bosko no longer speaks exaggerated ‘darkie’ dialogue, and in fact none of the jokes are race-based. We instead get celebrity lampoons of Garbo, Durante and Chevalier. The capper is a joke in which F.D.R. drinks beer.

Continuing the theme of the end of Prohibition, the same year’s Buddy’s Beer Garden gives us Buddy, an insipid white character commonly described as ‘a whiteface Bosko.’ Buddy runs a German-style beer garden; his girlfriend Cookie is a performer. In the unfunny finish, a ‘Mae West’ singer is revealed to be Buddy in drag. Although produced and animated by different hands, both cartoons make similar use of a backlit skirt effect that yields a peekabo look at Cookie and Honey’s legs.

The third cartoon The Dish Ran Away with the Spoon is a more standard ‘Toontown’ operetta starring anthropomorphized kitchen items. Songs owned by WB are billboarded: ‘Shuffle Off to Buffalo,’ ‘I’m Young and Healthy.’  For a finish, a blob of dough infused with yeast becomes a monster, and threatens the leading lady, a dish. No, literally a dish.

After Gabriel Over the White House, these irrational cartoons make complete sense.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

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Gabriel Over the White House
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Classic 1933 cartoons:
Bosko in Person
Buddy’s Beer Garden
The Dish Ran Away with the Spoon .
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: February 3, 2025
(7272gabr)

^*  That Gregory D. Black says T.F. Tweed’s source book takes place in 1950 raises some confusion — the book’s full title is Rinehard: A Melodrama of the Nineteen-Thirties.

Final product for this review was provided free by The Warner Archive Collection.

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