Hellen I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Stevecorp Don't listen to the negative reviews

Teringer An Exercise In Nonsense

ShangLuda Admirable film.

Fraucoach This is downright scary %$#@ in light of the results of the 2016 Presidential Election. It lurched around, swinging left and right, and it ended up so far right it fell over. Franchot Tone is charming here; you can see why the ladies were fighting over him. Karen Morley is lovely and effective, and Walter Huston is presidential and makes a good transition from intellectual lightweight to wise savior of the world. High production standards, too. It's pre-code, but lots of 1930s hokiness here, too.I still have the shakes after the election results, and I probably should have watched some lightweight distraction rather than this.

Larry41OnEbay-2 From my introduction at the Library of Congress in 2012. The motion picture GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE is a unique example of the genre of political drama, in fact it maybe the only Presidential biography movie as science fiction fantasy. Nancy Loe a historian and author on William Randolph Hearst sent an email to my wife Jenny this afternoon when she heard we were playing this film here tonight. And I quote: "Hearst's political ideas were directly expressed in his 1933 production entitled Gabriel Over the White House. The movie relates the story of President Jud Hammond (played by Walter Huston), whose ineffectual responses to the economic blight of the Depression satisfy only the corrupt political machine that secured his election. Through the intervention of a reporter (assisted by the angel Gabriel), Hammond abandons his passive Herbert Hooverish policies and transforms himself into "a dictatorial presence made in differing parts of Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and Huey Long. Hammond is granite in feature, solemn in word, aggressive in manner, and unconstitutional in action." Both the screenwriter, Carey Wilson, and the producer, Walter Wanger, recall Hearst participating actively on this film, even to the point of writing or rewriting the Presidential speeches used in the movie. Hearst hoped the film would inspire additional public support for newly-elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Hearst had not endorsed Roosevelt's Presidential aspirations until it became clear that Hearst's first choice, could not swing the necessary votes on the convention floor. Hearst agreed to release California's crucial delegates to Roosevelt from the Gothic Library, Hearst's private San Simeon office, and Roosevelt was duly nominated. Although he would soon break with Roosevelt, primarily over the issue of taxes on the wealthy, Hearst agreed with FDR that the first hundred days of the Roosevelt administration were crucial. Gabriel Over the White House, containing several references to the recent 1932 Presidential campaign, was a direct effort on Hearst's part to smooth the path for the real-life President he had helped into office." – Unquote. Made during the Pre-Code era the production code was more relaxed towards controversial story lines. The author of the novel that the film was based on Thomas Frederic Tweed who wrote the novel originally called "Rinehard" in England but changed to "Gabriel Over the White House : A Novel of the Presidency" for the U.S. I checked Amazon.com for copies of the book and only found three available selling for between $484 and $750.Tweed worked for a British politician David Lloyd George during the 1920's as a personal secretary. In the film he is portrayed by the Franchot Tone character. In real life he also fell in love with his bosses pretty personal secretary, in the film played by Karen Morley. But when he wrote his novel he changed the story to the 1950's and had it take place in the United States. But what was in the mind of the audiences of March 1933 when this film was brand new… The Great Depression started in October of 1929 with the stock market crash setting off a decade of high unemployment (15-20% by time this film opened), poverty, low profits, breadlines, etc. causing a general loss of confidence in economic growth. The depression bottomed out in the winter of 1932/33, just as Roosevelt took over. There are some incidents based on fact like when the movie shows an army of the unemployed in real life in 1932 the Bonus Army marched on Washington and then President Hoover asked the Army to force them out. In the movie a better solution was found and many of other aspects of the new deal are hinted at like the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. In conclusion this is not a great film, actually a bizarre film with strange ideas but a work of fiction that is never boring. And it's a great chance to see little Dickie Moore one of the little rascals who plays the presidents nephew, who is still alive and turned 87 this past September 12. I hope you enjoy this unusual film.

moogie777 I happened to watch this movie during the height of the debates about "bailouts" for the banks and car companies. People in the movie used exactly the same arguments as people today; I think the President even used the word "bailout" for the working people! I know that this movie was made at the height of the Great Depression, when there were numerous debates about what should be done to stimulate the economy. The difference between then and now is that in the movie the President basically shut down Congress and declared marshal law....and Congress went right along with it. The President became a benign dictator, which apparently the angle Gabriel had told him to do. I was just floored, watching this guy who looked so Presidential, it was very realistic in my opinion. Could we ever be convinced to give up our rights for the greater good? Well, we forget that Lincoln suspended Constitutional rights during the Civil War; but I'm not convinced that today's American would ever allow such a thing. Nope, not convinced at all. Extremely interesting movie.

bkoganbing Gabriel Over The White House comes to the movie going public, courtesy of William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan Productions, at a very special time in history when there was grave worry as to whether America and the capitalist system would survive. What producer Hearst is telling us is how he feels that the Deity if he intervened would solve all our problems.Walter Huston is our star/protagonist here, a newly elected president who is no Franklin D. Roosevelt, but rather more of a Warren Harding type. Catch Huston offering up the usual political pablum at his press conference in terms of what to do about the Depression. It's rather depressing. Later on at his cabinet meeting some issue about an appointment comes up and he just remarks that if you boys in the cabinet and party feel this way, who is he to question it.But then our president who the Secret Service would NEVER let get behind the wheel of a car totals the White House limousine and goes into a coma from the concussion. It's at that point Huston gets a heavenly intervention into his nature and starts enacting policies, presumably that God and William Randolph Hearst would approve, not necessarily in that order.Huston makes first an amiable nonentity and then a stern statesman in the White House. It's like he's playing two different parts and in fact that's precisely the point of the film. Besides economic want, folks in 1932-33 were very much concerned about the rise of lawlessness, organized criminal gangs that grew out of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution. A lot of what Huston does could be construed as worse than the disease in terms of civil liberties. Repealing Prohibition was something only a few wackos like Alfred E. Smith wanted and Smith was Hearst's mortal political enemy. From the man who couldn't wait to get to war in Cuba in 1898, William Randolph Hearst had become a pacifist and an advocate for disarmament and he proves it by going farther than either the Washington or London conferences on that subject. Adolph Hitler was on the verge of becoming Germany's Chancellor at the time Gabriel Over The White House came out, someone like him wasn't factored into the equation for world peace.All in the name of peace, prosperity, and the coming millenia and since it's all directed from heaven, we don't and aren't supposed to question it. The perfect world in the mind of William Randolph Hearst.Gabriel Over The White House tells us a lot about America midst the Depresssion, our hopes, fears, and aspirations. And it offers the more authoritarian method of attaining those aspirations. It's an entertaining film, but it's more a psycho-political picture of the USA at that point in our history.