The Screengrab : william randolph hearst

Insufficiently Forgotten Films: "Gabriel Over the White House" (1933)

Phil Nugent — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 18:00:00 GMT

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.

Top Thirteen Greatest Fictional Movie Presidents, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Jonathan Demme's documentary Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains opens this week, and while it isn't really about Carter the President so much as about Carter the Ex-President, it got us thinking about the Oval Office and the movies. Depicting Presidents is always a dicey proposition on film. In contemporary films, there are fewer ways to take your audience out of a movie than to show the President of the United States and have it not be the actual current President of the United States (another reason why Crimson Tide, with its CNN-generated Bill Clinton cameo, is so awesome). In films set in the future, it's hard to show the President and have it not feel like a ham-handed attempt at instant dystopianism. (Funny how those silly people in the future rarely elect somebody halfway decent to the office.) Our list this week focuses on Great Fictional Movie Presidents. But you'll notice that we've included two sorta-not-fictional Honorable Mentions. You may also notice that we've avoided some movie Presidents (coughMichaelDouglascough) who irritate the hell out of us.

Peter Sellers as President Merkin Muffley, DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Of all the roles played by Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick's brilliant black comedy, none leaves an impression quite like President Merkin Muffley. (The dual vagina references in the name are as sure a sign as any that anarchic comic author Terry Southern was behind the screenplay.) Allegedly based on fussy Democrat Adlai Stevenson, Muffley's role as the sole voice of reason and practicality in a film full of powerful madmen anchors the entire movie — and, on occasion, such as in the legendary and hilarious telephone conversation with the Soviet premier (much of which, like a good deal of Sellers' dialogue, was originally improvised by the actor himself), provides some of Dr. Strangelove's funniest moments. Muffley wasn't always meant to be the film's unflappable straight man; Southern originally wrote him as an extremely loopy collection of tics and affectations, including a severe head cold and an obvious and stereotypical homosexual demeanor; the former was so effective that it basically prevented anyone from playing off of him, and the latter, in rehearsal, was felt by both actor and director, to be too broad. Instead, Sellers played Muffley as almost preternaturally bland, which made his occasional forays into hysteria all the more effective.

Walter Huston as President Judson C. "Judd" Hammond, GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE (1933)

This 1933 picture, which opened during Franklin Roosevelt's first term as president, was directed by Gregory La Cava, but the real driving force behind the production was William Randolph Hearst, who intended it as a primer designed to show FDR how he ought to go about solving the country's problems. President Hammond is a compromise candidate, a cynical party hack who couldn't care less about his country's citizens or its future. But then he's injured in a car accident and slips into a coma, and when he comes out of it, he's a changed man, and he rolls up his sleeves and begins to do whatever it takes to make things right. His methods include firing his whole cabinet, threatening to declare martial law until Congress lets him do whatever he wants, and having all the gangsters in the country rounded up and summarily executed. His reign of righteous terror climaxes with a scene where he gathers all the ambassadors of the world's nations onto a yacht and treats them to a show of American military power that convinces them that they have no choice but to disarm and quickly fork over the money they owe the U.S. from the first World War. Having rendered the United States prosperous, crime-free and dominant, President Hammond contentedly drops dead; the movie leaves open the possibility that he's been dead since the car crash and that his body has been serving as an earthly conduit for the Lord. FDR wound up being a disappointment to Hearst, not taking much from the Hammond playbook, but some historians think that the movie may have actually prophesied the administration of a much later American president.

Donald Pleasance as The President of the United States, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)

You know, sometimes you really feel sorry for Donald Pleasance. The poor guy survived the Blitz, fought in the Second World War, and went on to become President of the United States despite the constitutional hindrance of having been born in England. And what does it get him after forty years of struggle? Some mouthy stewardess blows up Air Force One and leaves him stranded in New York (which just happens to be a maximum security penitentiary, peopled with murderers, drug lords, and assorted human scum — nothing like it is in real life, of course), where he is continually menaced by the guy who sang "Grazing in the Grass." U.S. presidents in action movies tend to break down pretty cleanly into one of two categories — the Fightin' President, who punches people and shoots down alien warships, and the Frightened President, who cowers in a corner and waits for a real tough-guy he-man to come rescue him. For most of Escape from New York's run time, Pleasance's unnamed President is decidedly the latter, and we're clearly meant to feel some degree of sympathy towards him as he awaits rescue (like Nixon, he apparently has a secret plan to end the war). Still, it's hard not to come away feeling a bit of sympathy for the terrorists — after all, the guy did turn Manhattan into a prison. Won't somebody think of the restaurants?

Terry Crews as President Camacho, IDIOCRACY (2006)

Postponed for over a year before getting a blink-and-you-missed-it release last fall, Mike Judge's cult-classic-in-the-making imagined a future in which the morons have inherited the Earth. In a world where Starbucks sells both lattes and handjobs and crops are watered with Brawndo™ Energy Drinks, it only makes sense that the President of the United States would be a trash-talking, hard-partying ex-porn star and five-time Ultimate Smackdown Champion. President Camacho, played with great comic relish by ex-NFL defensive lineman Terry Crews, is the kind of fearless leader who sports a tank top and American-flag warmup pants at Presidential functions, brandishes a machine gun during his State of the Union address, and rides a four-wheeler everywhere he goes, national security be damned. But his actual leadership skills are limited to making the country's smartest man his new Secretary of the Interior and tasking him to solve the nation's famine problem in one week, or else he'll get thrown into the ring during a nationally-televised monster truck rally. A few decades ago, it might have been tempting to read Judge's vision of the presidency 500 years from now as a dystopian satire conceived by a former high-school outcast sick of seeing the dumb jocks get all the glory. But nowadays, when having a significant speaking role in Predator is as accurate an indicator of electability as any previous public office, one can't help but wonder whether it'll even take five centuries to place us squarely in the political climate imagined by Idiocracy.

Charles During as President David Stevens, TWILIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING (1977)

Charles Durning's President Stevens is a squat, foul-mouthed sign of the post-Nixonian times. On the one hand, it's doubtful a pre-Nixon president would have been allowed to drink and curse this much on-screen: Stevens has a "fuck" for every occasion. But he's also made directly responsible for the U.S.'s post-Vietnam fallout, blackmailed by Burt Lancaster into promising to reveal — on national TV! — our cynical, soldier-killing true reasons for entering the war. Impressively naive, Stevens is forced to condemn the administrations preceding him: he retains Nixon's profanity but none of his attitude.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov