A Must See Crazy Old Movie -Gabriel Over the White House

I had a hard time sleeping last night so I turned on the TV. I ended up watching the crazy bizarre and slightly frightening movie called Gabriel Over the White House (1933)

It is CRAZY. I am pretty amazed I never heard this of this movie. I love old movies and political movies but never heard of this one. It is like a Fascist Mr Smith Goes to Washington.

Try to catch it if plays again on there again . Most of it is on You Tube it appears in various places .

It is worth watching.

Basically the Angel Gabriel takes a rather care free not serious President after a car accident and makes him a supreme Fascist Dictator that:

Gets Congress to give him Supreme Power,

declares martial law ,

Starts a Federal Police Force with tanks that arrest Gangsters and gives them military Court Martials and executions ,

and bullies Belgium into paying war debt

,

among other things.

All this is portrayed as a good thing.

All done with good ole patriotic music and people singing Glory Glory and Jim Browns body.

It has a rather funny crazy DRIVE BY GANGSTER shoot it up scene at the White House that ends with a military execution of the gangsters in front of the Statue of Liberty!!! See that scene here.

It appears in 1933 this was big hit but after Hitler started his reign of terror not so much and MGM pretty much withdrew it from circulation and has largely been forgotten . It appears that not did FDR like it he wrote parts of the script and gave ideas. Why he seemed to endorsed such a movie that had such a storyline is weird.

There are several good reviews of this movie I would recommend that hits on the various themes. A good overview of the plot is here at Gabriel Over the White House (1933) (Ferdy on Films, etc.). This is one of those movie the "left" owns as it were and Jonah Goldberg has brief thoughts on it at Gabriel Over the White House .

Also on the political angle and strange Hearst background see J.B. Spins: Breadlines & Champagne: Gabriel Over the White House and this fairly good article Hollywood as Propaganda Machine: Context for Gabriel Over the White House . This blogger makes an interesting observation:

It would be fascinating to see what landed on the cutting room floor before Gabriel was released on March 31, 1933 less than a month after Roosevelt’s inauguration and during the famous Hundred Days of legislation that launched the New Deal. The plot of a cynical, womanizing bachelor president who — under divine guidance — makes himself a benevolent dictator and uses overwhelming military force to end organized crime and war was so incendiary that the Hays Office demanded major changes. Bear in mind that as weird as it is, what you’ll see is a vanilla version of what Hearst really wanted. We usually think of the Hays Code as protecting the public morals from too much and the wrong kind of sex, but it also contained this “General Principle:” “Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.” Hearst had always been a law unto himself, and so is the protagonist, President Judd Hammond played by Walter Huston, who answers to a higher law than the U.S. Constitution.

A political movie that has strangely disappeared from the American cultural mindset