MovieChat Forums > Gabriel Over the White House (1933) Discussion > Tend to agree with the synopsis poster

Tend to agree with the synopsis poster

posted 14 years ago by Romojo
9 replies | jump to latest

Interesting movie - saw it today for the first time. Amazing that the President bcomes a benevolent dictator (is there such a thing?) and then actually uses the army (FBI?) to take out the crime syndicates. There's a scene where Franchot Tone and five armoured cars get fired upon by the gangsters and then just open up. They capture the gangsters, try them in military court (why?) and then shoot them. Amazing.

1933 - different times. I wonder if MGM wanted that sort of treatment with the depression and the 18th amendment.

Not a great movie - sometimes almost sanctimonious - but I've never seen anything like it.

[–] atheismyes 14 years ago

Fascist propaganda!

[–] agspiess 14 years ago

Fascism isn't a bad idea, it's just the genocide and supression of free speech that spoils the fun.

[–] andy-938-5086 13 years ago

In "The Trouble with Normal," Bruce Cockburn sang "fashionable fascism dominates the scene," but it never has dominated like it did in the '30s. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin were products of this age of the strongman. There were numerous voices in the US that bent in the same general direction, and this film comes from one of them.

I've heard reports of this film for many years now; supposedly congress is machine-gunned, or the cabinet, or...you get the idea. It's not as bad as all that, but it's pretty clearly sympathetic to that approach. Do you ever see a court, other than the court-marshal, in this film? Nooo...

It must have been a much more frightening--and appealing--film at the time it was released. Now it merely looks like a curiosity...but.

[–] toolkien 12 years ago

It's sad how a country that has the highest incarceration rate in the world, is running huge deficits, adding more bureaucracy by the day, has hundreds of thousands of troops stationed around the world, has high taxation/regulation, persecutes people who have not harmed another person or their property, has the "democratic" process on lockdown, controls interest rates, and monetary policy (inflation), is not seen as fascist and that notion has somehow passed away as a novelty of the 30's and 40's. Once a government embarks on a path that stops using defensive Force to protect people and their property, but uses offensive Force to centrally command resources and behaviors of its citizens, and bends the existing institutions to its will, it is fascism. We're right in the middle of it, and predictably it's not going so well. Just because there's a left leaning branch that panders to the proletariat and a right leaning branch that panders to the bourgeoisie, and both that carry on symbiotic relationships with the elite, doesn't mean it's not fascism.

Some people are afraid of the unknown. I don't know why, and it scares me.

[–] PeaceRocks 12 years ago

toolkien, thank you for your post

[–] borg1005-1 8 years ago

War is when the government tells you who the enemy is.

Revolution is when you figure it out for yourself.

[–] bjm92649 11 years ago

Ask a liberal: Excluding the war-making and genocide, would they have any additional criticisms of national socialism?

[–] illbeyourmirror 11 years ago

It is interesting that in this film, the fascist president is implied to pull the States out of the depression through world peace.

In reality, Adolf Hitler implicitly pulled the States out of the depression through world war.

I love dictatorship.

[–] Carycomic 11 years ago

Dear Romojo:

By machine gunning the White House (and, before that, blowing up a nationalized liquor store following the in-story repeal of Prohibition), the Nick Diamond crime family had basically declared war on the Unites States government. So, Federal Police Chief Beekman tried them as war criminals.

"After the Revolution, shoot all the lawyers."