THE MOVIE: Directed by Gregory La Cava and based on a novel by T. F. Tweed, it stars Walter Huston as Judson C. "Judd" Hammond, an affable glad-hander and crooked hack politician who becomes a compromise candidate for president at his party's deadlocked convention. Hammond's election would seem to augur a quiet, complacent time in his country's history, but while driving himself through the streets of D.C., the Prez does his James Dean impression and winds up in a coma. He is not expected to survive, but he soon rises from his bed of pain, and when he does, he's a new man, fiercely committed to using the power of his office to fix what needs fixing and no longer interested in the sweet fleshy charms of his personal assistant and mistress, Pendie Malloy (Karen Morley). Fending off an attempt by the appalled jackals in Congress to impeach his newly honest ass, Judd gathers support from The People, threatens to declare martial law, and cloaks himself in powers that abolish the checks and balances system, making him answerable to no man.
Thus equipped, he takes charge of the banks and creates new work programs before turning his attention to the real problem vexing our nation: Da Mob. Judd abolishes Prohibition and then, in private communication with the criminal kingpin Nick Diamond, who's in charge of everything bad, suggests that he make plans to return to the land of his fathers, since he's just lost the raison d'etre for his bootlegging business and, besides, we don't cotton to foreigners in these parts. Diamond offers his counter proposal in the form of an attempted mob hit on the White House that leaves Pendie in the hospital and Judd in a state of high dudgeon. Taking the gloves off, he has all the gangsters in the country rounded up and summarily executed by firing squad in view of the Statue of Liberty. For his last trick, Judd gathers all the ambassadors from other lands aboard a yacht, informs them that he is rejecting the universally agreed upon limitations on naval power, oversees the bombing of a couple of abandoned American battleships as a demonstration of the power of American military might, and then muses that if all these jaspers could persuade their governments to immediately repay their mountainous war debts to the United States, which would destabilize their own national budgets to such a degree that Judd would have no need to fear that they'd be upgrading their own armies anytime soon, it sure would get them on his good side. Having threatened his way to guaranteed world peace, Judd collapses and, this time, finally cashes in his chips for good. The suggestion is made that perhaps he never really recovered from his accident but has been possessed by the spirit of a heavenly agent working through him to restore God's country to full strength.
WHY IT DESERVES TO BE FORGOTTEN: It is clinically insane.
WHY, FOR SOME PEOPLE, IT CAN NEVER POSSIBLY BE FORGOTTEN ENOUGH: Gabriel Over the White House was perhaps the most ambitious attempt by the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst to use the movies as an extension of his abilities to shape public opinion. To movie nuts, Hearst is best remembered as the target of Citizen Kane, and also as the man who destroyed the movie career of his charming and talented longtime mistress, Marion Davies, by taking charge of her film career. (Davies was a gifted comedian, but Hearst wanted to showcase her as a noble romantic goddess, and he spent a fortune producing movies that were tributes to his wrong-headed idea of how she ought to appear and publicizing them in his papers.) But Hearst was also a genuine power broker who was interested in using all the latest tools of the mass media at his disposal. Hearst felt that his support had put Franklin Roosevelt on the path to victory at the 1932 Democratic convention and ultimately to the White House, and Gabriel, which went into production during the election and opened a couple of months after FDR was sworn in as president, was meant to be taken as his instruction manual for the new president, a list of helpful suggestions.
It's a measure of how powerful Hearst still was at this time that Roosevelt reportedly humored him by agreeing to take a look at the script and jotting some notes on it before returning it to the film crew. This became a point of pride with Hearst, and some feeble-minded but excitable historians even wonder how much of the New Deal might have been inspired by Judd Hammond's efforts to spread the wealth around, but it's hard to imagine that the man who had just inherited Herbert Hoover's problems really had all that much interest in pitching in on Walter Huston's latest. In any case, FDR failed to either whack Al Capone or tell his own mistress to take a hike, and within a couple of years, Hearst had soured on the president he'd once regarded fondly as his own creation. ("For forty years appeared in Kane newsprint, no public issue on which Kane papers took no stand. No public man whom Kane himself did not support or denounce - often support, then denounce!") But Gabriel briefly re-entered the national conversation a few years ago when Mississippi historian Robert S. McElvaine conjectured that it might have predicted, Nostradamus-like, the coming of another American president whose achievements are on the far opposite side of the scale than Roosevelt's.