Gabriel Over the White House

It can’t happen here… until it does. A marvelously fascinating film about a crooked politician suffering either a brain hemorrhage or divine intervention that causes him to radically reject and remake the American government inclusive of an anti mafia gestapo and his own fascist disbanding of the House and Senate. According to the picture, It’s the only possible solution to the ravages of the depression and governmental systems still in The status quo thrall of the usual ruling castes. But for all that imagines tearing the whole system down, it is a remarkably unimaginative film relative to the breadth and scope of the new Deal that was rapidly making this film out of date before it ever got released. To that end its politics are mysteriously opaque to us today, I suspect this was a right wing film, hence the fascism, but there’s enough confused acrimony to make one wonder just what this all was directed at.

The Warner archive Blu-ray is a marvelous presentation, with a couple of cartoons included as bonus features