Gabriel over the White House is a wonderful film – a strange definition of 1930s Hollywood as a mass of contradictions. It is almost socialist in imagery, yet it was actively backed by Hearst, whose sympathies for fascism are well known. The film was shot fast and cheaply, which does not show because of the work of two brilliant personalities: director Gregory La Cava (My Man Godfrey, The 5th Avenue Girl) and producer Walter Wanger, who was obsessed with creating a “sensational” political melodrama.

Matthew Bernstein, author of Walter Wanger. Hollywood Independent, sums the film up: “President Hammond is an ordinary, amiable party politician, who after a fatal car accident is revived by God to become a dictator. He dismisses his cabinet and the Congress, repeals Prohibition and punishes gangsters, creates a working corps for the unemployed, enforces disarmament, and creates a new American currency. When felled by a heart attack, Hammond reverts to his former self and tries to rescind his ‘inspired’ actions before he dies.”

The President’s return to the original principles of the country, and more generally his decision to be honest and as simple, cause him to appear to be a madman. The unemployed are ready to march on Washington, and for once a big Hollywood production gives us a dignified view, without comic relief, of the activities of the militant and have-nots. (Here the decision by the filmmakers was poignant: instead of illustrating the ironic fantasy of writer Thomas W. Tweed, they produced a realist film, with newsreel accuracy.) While Gabriel Over the White House is certainly a “fairy-tale treatment of serious economic and social problems” (Bernstein), yet we see much, even if there were retakes and re-cutting of references to armed, revolutionary-minded workers, the contemptuous treatment of Congress, the treatment of foreign leaders.

Everything is open. Is the program presented by the President virulently and creatively radical, or near dictatorial? Is it a vital Rooseveltian tract or Swiftian irony? Or is it perhaps in praise of anti-democratic forms of governing? Is it a lure or a warning? The profoundly ambivalent film shares the characteristics of many later films where behind populist simplicity looms the danger of extreme right-wing temptations.

Last, please do remember the memorable one-liner of W.C. Fields about La Cava (whose talent he appreciated deeply): “Don’t ever sit on a toilet seat after Gregory La Cava has used it.”

Peter von Bagh