TV Note: "Gabriel Over the White House" (11/7)
David Shasha
"Gabriel Over the White House" will be screened on Turner Classic Movies Monday, November 7th at 10:00 AM
Forgotten Film Classic: "Gabriel over the White House" (1933)
The director Gregory La Cava was the man who brought us perhaps the greatest screwball comedy ever made: The 1936 classic “My Man Godfrey” as all film students know was one of the top dozen Hollywood screen gems. The underlying theme of “My Man Godfrey” was the fight of the little man to retain his dignity against the glitz and superficiality of the wealthy ditzheads that were ubiquitous in the “flapper” era of the Roaring 20's.
But the film that preceded "Godfrey" was a far more complex and far darker film, a film that is more akin to a Coen Brothers black comedy or a Mel Brooks profane parody – the sorts of films that leave a person's mouth hanging open trying to figure out what in the world is the movie supposed to be doing. Perhaps the closest analogue in the Hollywood canon I can think of is Ernst Lubitsch's “To Be or Not to Be” with Jack Benny and Carole Lombard (with Lombard also figuring as a star in “My Man Godfrey”).
“Gabriel Over the White House” is a film rarely screened that is one of the great anomalies in the history of Hollywood, a film that sits in the same general company as Frank Capra's “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” but takes its subject matter in a far different – and far more subversive – manner.
The story of this strange film – but a film that perplexes and lingers in the mind for hours after it is over – is simple if far-fetched: A newly-elected president, played by the legendary Walter Huston, is ushered into his job by some old hacks and proves to be a perfect “candidate” for the status quo of Washington – a bunch of corrupt bureaucrats who want to perpetuate the horrid state of the Depression that the country finds itself in.
These politicians seem to work hand in glove with the fat cats and criminals to ensure that the masses of poor and unemployed and starving never get their fair hearing from their representatives. The president is quite happy to play the role of a stooge – that is, until he gets into an automobile accident when he drives his car at 100 miles per hour.
While in a coma, the president has a vision of what are told is the angel Gabriel.
After this vision, the president comes out of his coma and begins to clean house. He takes a great interest in the poor and in the state of the world. He tries to convince his cabinet to come along with him - but they hold a meeting and decide that they are going to advise Congress to impeach him. The president then fires his cabinet and goes to Congress where he invokes martial law and appoints himself dictator of the US.
As if all this is not strange enough, he then creates a new “army” to employ all the country's unemployed and repeals the 18th Amendment and opens up government-sponsored liquor stores to try and put the bootleggers and gangsters out of business.
By the film's end, the president decides to call in the foreign debt owed to the US by the European powers in the aftermath of the First World War. When the countries try to weasel out of paying, the president threatens them into signing a non-proliferation treaty where all world nations will agree to destroy their military stocks.
The president then has a heart attack and dies. “The End” flashes on the screen.
"Gabriel Over the White House" was a utopian film – perhaps the only one that I can recall produced in Hollywood (the film was released by Louis B. Mayer's M-G-M and produced by William Randolph Hearst’s production company – yes, the William "Citizen Kane" Randolph Hearst) – that actually had the temerity to indict the entire political system to the point where it advocated a bloodless presidential coup in order to clear out the corruption and get the Depression over with.
The film at its surface is indeed bizarre: The scenes of the film consistently cut to black-outs and there is little overt humor in the work. While there is a good deal of black comedy, the film is not lighthearted in any conventional sense. But even as it is a deadly serious satire and fantasy, it is crafted, like “My Man Godfrey,” in an expert fashion with brilliant performances – especially that of Huston - a tight script and sharp direction.
“Gabriel Over the White House” is a Hollywood anomaly – and perhaps even an American anomaly. Compared to Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, the film delves much more deeply into the American pathology – the accrual of unearned wealth at the expense of the Everyman sucker – and takes on the era of Herbert Hoover in a very overt and gutsy manner.
I cannot really think of another film that treats such serious and complicated subject matter with such a hairbrained and scattershot Hollywood technique. The film was first suppressed by Mayer until Hoover was out of office and then fell into obscurity after the rise of Hitler in 1933 – the very same year the film was originally released.
But in many ways “Gabriel Over the White House” was an anti-fascist masterpiece that railed against the foolishness and decrepitness that had overtaken the country and that climaxed with the Gilded Class trying to maintain their prestige and wealth by destroying the middle and working classes after Wall Street fell in 1929. The film's prescience brings an understanding of the relationship between the First World War – the war of the Imperialists – and rails mightily against the possibility of yet another war that it thinks will destroy the world.
So while we continue to be comforted by the platitudes of Frank Capra – and I do not wish to minimize them in any way – there is yet a deeper and darker American classic that exists in the subterranean crevices of Hollywood history – Gregory La Cava's unknown masterpiece “Gabriel Over the White House,” a film unlike any other you have ever seen - or probably will ever see.
David Shasha
From SHU 87, January 30, 2004