Has anyone seen "Gabrial Over the White House"....

[whistle]

...Here is a review of the original version of the 1933 movie:
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Gabriel Over the White House is one of the most amazing artifacts to have emerged in the video era. It was a film that wasn’t much seen when it came out and prints were out of general circulation for many years - it, for example, rarely ever screens on tv. Its’ notoriety as a political fable grew in infamy. Seeing it is a truly amazing experience.

The film was produced by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. It is really almost a dramatized political campaign speech. It sits right atop the major issues of the Depression era - unemployment and homelessness, Prohibition bootlegging and mobsters. It is a fantasy of a desire for ruthlessly decisive action to solve these sweeping problems. (This was made before Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, and uncannily prefigured many things that Roosevelt adopted as President, albeit less extreme). The President is initially portrayed as a flabby politician who ignores the pressing problems until an accident and the ambiguous suggestion of angelic intervention. It is what he emerges as after that point that makes the film so amazing (and notorious). Newly reformed, he initiates martial law; fires all the weak-minded politicians; nationalizes bootlegging; mobilizes the army against mobsters, court martials them before a military tribunal and sentences them to execution before firing squad - even admittedly without any evidence. Although it is finally when the film starts to take on US foreign relations that it gains a spectacular tackiness, seeming to embody all the most obnoxious attitudes of American imperialist bombast, wherein the US builds up a massive Naval power (the scenes of which contain an interesting early prediction of an Air Force of bombers), all to scare other nations into paying outstanding war debts. “The United States must have the greatest Navy in the world because we want world peace,” The President says at one point. (Clearly US financial needs are equal to world peace - which these days may actually be closer to the truth that one thinks). What is alarming about this is that when a country like Germany, which in actuality ended up being financially crippled into massive inflation by war debts (all of created the conditions that allowed Adolf Hitler to rise to power), is dismissed as being no more than a cowardly bad debtor. A truly unique film.

<link> http://www.moria.co.nz/fantasy/gabrielover.htm




And then there is this article:

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“Gabriel Over the White House” – The Remake; it appears that the current president is living out a movie fantasy

By Robert S. McElvaine

OpEdNews.com

CLINTON, Miss. As I read Ron Suskind's dismaying cover story on President Bush's religiously inspired certainty in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, "Without a Doubt," I kept experiencing déjà vu.

I've seen this storyline somewhere before: A president who had been a feckless, party-loving, hard-drinking man, is visited by a messenger of God and suddenly changes his ways. Thereafter, he knows what is right and will listen to no one who suggests otherwise. This president, convinced that he is doing God's work--that he is God’s spokesman on earth--suspends civil liberties to fight crime. He repudiates international treaties and announces that the United States will build new weapons to put itself in a position of world dominance. He orders other nations to follow American dictates, or else. That the "or else" means using American military might for preemptive war is made clear to world leaders when they are assembled and shown a demonstration of American military power. They all immediately agree to do what the United States (and God) demands.

Then it hit me. The plot that sounds so much like the way George W. Bush sees himself and his presidency is that of a now obscure 1933 film produced by William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan Studios, Gabriel Over the White House. In it, an irresponsible man named Judson Hammond, played by Walter Huston, is elected to the presidency on promises he doesn't intend to keep. "Oh, don't worry," an aide tells him, "by the time they realize you’re not keeping them, your term will be over." Then, driving his car recklessly, President Hammond has a tire blowout at 100 mph. He apparently dies from his injuries, but is transformed by divine intervention and emerges, literally born again, as a supremely confident leader who has no doubts in the rightness of his course. He demands that Congress give him dictatorial powers and then adjourn, so that he can solve all domestic and international problems. He once was lost; now he's found. But what has he found?

President Hammond's approach to the world, like that of George W. Bush, fits with neither traditional Republican isolationism nor the Wilsonian internationalism practiced by most presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt through George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Rather, the film, with the assurance that God is on the side of the United States, advances an approach to the world that might best be termed "isolated internationalism." With God on our side, this nation should neither withdraw from the world nor work out agreements with other nations to form cooperative international coalitions. Rather, the United States should simply declare what it will do and expect others to do. Other nations are welcome to join in a Coalition of the Willing, meaning those willing to follow unquestioningly the divinely inspired Leader of the United States.

<link> http://www.opednews.com/mcelvaine_102104_gabriel.htm

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