Gabriel Over the White House

As America despaired during the early days of the Depression, Hollywood met the challenge with chorus girls, gangsters, romances, a few dramas of social realism, and this one-of-a-kind thoroughly astonishing fantasy: Gabriel Over the White House. Walter Huston gives a bravura performance, starring as a corrupt U.S. president who has a brush with an angel after a near-fatal car crash, and awakens determined to right all of America's wrongs-now or by any means possible. Towering like a Yankee Colossus, he sweeps constitutional safeguards aside to tackle poverty, crime and world peace as a populist dictator, winning the adulation of a grateful nation. Gregory La Cava, who would later score Oscar * nominations for his work on 1936's My Man Godfrey and 1937's Stage Door, directed this grandly made, must-see curio!

• drama
• fantasy