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 stars 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 America's wrongs -- now and 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!

• crime
• drama