Eve Arden in "Miss Aggie's Farewell Performance" on Ellery Queen

One of the joys of writing about classic films is occasionally exploring favorite stars’ performances on the small screen.  Eve Arden, veteran of stage and films, had also enjoyed a thriving career on radio as the beloved Our Miss Brooks.  In a guest appearance on Ellery Queen in the mid-1970s, she plays a pompous radio show star with panache.  It is a joy to watch her; too bad she dies early in the episode.  But it’s a mystery program and somebody’s got to be murdered. 

This is my entry into the 11^th Annual Favourite TV Show Episode Blogathon hosted by Terence at his great A Shroud of Thoughts blog.  Have a look at the other lovely posts at thislink.

The episode “The Adventure of Miss Aggie’s Farewell Performance” stars Eve Arden as Miss Aggie, “beloved principal” of a small-town high school on a daytime soap opera.  Her role as principal is a promotion in job title and tribute to her longtime Connie Brooks character, who was a lowly high school English teacher.  Except for that carefully intoned, crystal voice, the characters are nothing alike.  Hapless Connie had a wry sense of humor, and the character of Miss Aggie is all hearts and flowers, though the actress playing her is a bit of a phony, full of venom and self-aggrandizement.  She rules the roost in the small radio studio, demanding and getting attention, favor, and tribute, if not affection from her cast, which includes Bert Parks playing the football coach, and Penelope Windust as the ingenue, of whom she is jealous.

In the middle of a broadcast, Eve sips water and begins to choke, and collapses, as the organist covers with a burst of incidental melody, as was common on radio, where in some shows it seemed every dramatic moment was punctuated by a blast on the Wurlitzer.  The shy, mousy organist is played sweetly by Bernice Colen, a common face on 1970s television.

Not dead yet, Eve Arden is taken to the hospital, where she lords it over the floor in her private room swamped with floral tributes from fans.  Reigning in her feathery bedjacket, she holds court for the press, and is especially pleased that Ellery Queen is on the case to investigate who poisoned her.  She is so used to acting a part, she asks him to call her by her character name, “Miss Aggie.”

Jim Hutton plays a bumbling but clever Ellery Queen and David Wayne is his crusty father, Inspector Richard Queen of the New York City Police.  The time period of the show is post-World War II in New York, with some foggy establishing shots of the Empire State Building and late-model cars driving past their brownstone where father and son share an apartment.  Ellery is a mystery writer, and the program, as fans will know, is inspired by the series of books and short stories written from 1929 through 1971 by the writing team of Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee, who published under the pseudonym “Ellery Queen.”

The TV series lasted only one year, from the fall of 1975 through the spring of 1976, and it was probably my favorite show, or at least one of them, when I was entering my teen years.  I loved everything about it, from the saxophone wail of the jazzy theme, to the opening credits, to the accuracy of its period setting, to the parade of favorite classic film stars, and younger familiar TV character actors, that made it such a kick to watch.  I don’t know why it didn’t last longer, but it was terrific show.  It managed to carry off an irresistible blend of whimsical storytelling with sentimental nostalgia. 

It led to me reading the Ellery Queen books, and Agatha Christie, and eventually led to writing my own post-War II mystery series here are Barnes & Noble, or here at Amazon. Or here, directly from me.  Oh, come on.  All TV shows have commercials.

I really only had one complaint of the series, but it can be traced to the books and classic mysteries of this sort: the well-worn device of the victim leaving a dying clue.  Some of the episodes’ dying clues are little overreaching.  Personally, were I shot in my poofy bedjacket in my hospital room, I would not be trying to figure out how to create an elaborate clue to the identity of my killer that only Ellery Queen could solve.  I would be trying to attract the attention of a nurse, or even a janitor, somebody who could get me some help.  Or franticly making my peace with the Creator.  But then, I have never been very clever, not enough to spend my last breath devising an intricate clue.  

Eve Arden, does, indeed, succumb to a gunshot wound while in the hospital, and Ellery solves the case in such a roundabout way that we kind of forgot he was even investigating it.  His casual solutions also baffle and infuriate his rival, Simon Brimmer, who is a professional radio criminologist, desperately trying to get his ratings up and his sponsor dollars increased.  Simon is played by the wonderful John Hillerman, just as dapper and acerbic, with his ascot and cigarette holder, as his later role on Magnum P.I., for which most people probably remember him better.

Another feature to the program is that just before the final scene, and just before the commercial break before the final scene, Jim Hutton would break the fourth wall and speak directly to the TV viewers and review the clues and the suspects, and ask them if they had figured it out yet.  Try as I might during that commercial, I don’t think I ever got the answer right.

Also in the cast is Betty White, who plays Eve Arden’s agent.  John McGiver plays the show’s stern and stuffy sponsor.  It would be Mr. McGiver’s last role; he died of a heart attack in September 1975.  This program was broadcast a few weeks later on October 16, 1975.

The series is apparently now in public domain and you can watch it here at the Internet Archive.  Scroll down to the episode.

Please have a look at the other blogs participating in the 11^th Annual Favorite TV Show Episode Blogathon hosted by Terrence at A Shroud of Thoughts.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation.

Zoom talk on my book CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS!

Join me online for a Zoom talk on my book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS! The presentation will be hosted by the Holyoke (Massachusetts) Public Library, scheduled for Thursday, February 27th at 3:00 p.m. The event will be a PowerPoint talk with images from the classic children's literature I discuss in the book, with some time afterward for questions and comments. I'd love to hear about your favorites when you were kids.

Register for the Zoom talk here at the link below. See you then!

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/jrzRhtp3RO6_5MhcmpfxXg#/registration

Birthright - 1938

Birthright (1938) would have astonished and enlightened white moviegoers, but unfortunately, it was produced for a segregated audience, for Black patrons in movie houses that catered to them.  Just as I mentioned in this previous post on Two-Gun Man from Harlem, made in the same year, one wonders that if such “race films” were seen by white audiences in the 1930s, the Civil Rights movement might not have been delayed so long.

There is a rawness to Birthright that strips away at the stereotyped depiction of African Americans in mainstream Hollywood films, where Black actors are seen only briefly and always in uncomplicated roles, their motives and their feelings unexplored.  The characters in Birthright and their problems are many-layered, where success is measured in the ability to cope rather than to triumph.

A recent Harvard graduate, who is a Black man played by Carman Newsome, returns to his small town in Tennessee with the intention to open an educational academy for young Black students, to lift their circumstances and opportunities in life.  He is thwarted by a white man who swindles him, and even by the African American community who have so long been kept down that they resist and mock his efforts. Mr. Newsome reminds one a little of William Powell in appearance, very handsome, with his tall, slender build, his homburg hat and his pencil-thin mustache.  What he lacks, however, is the wry and playful savviness of Powell’s usual characters.  Newsome’s Peter Siner is quiet, mannerly, but amazingly naïve about the social climate in his old hometown that makes him such an easy mark for white swindlers and untrusting Blacks in the “darktown” neighborhood. 

But his dogged determination is admirable, and his seemingly innocent demeanor allows the audience to see the difference an education in the North has made for him.  When he and his buddy, Tump Pack, played by Alec Lovejoy, are engaged in conversation with a white man, his friend—who continues to wear his World War I Army uniform—removes his hat and his physical posture becomes somewhat stooped, subservient, making himself pleasant and agreeable to the white man.  Newsome, however, without any belligerence or protest of this behavior, quite obliviously remains standing erect, looking down upon the white man, and keeps his homburg on his head.  He speaks with all, no matter their skin color, as an equal—though in fact, his education should make him their superior.

Ethel Moses plays Cissie, Alec Lovejoy’s girlfriend, who gets into trouble by stealing her employer’s broach and by refusing the advances of her employer’s son, and is arrested by the bullying sheriff.   Through the course of the movie, Newsome and Ethel Moses fall in love, are pursued by Lovejoy, who ultimately is killed by the sheriff (in his attempt to rescue Ethel from the sheriff, the old soldier hears battle sounds and prepares to go "over the top," a poignant scene of a man who cannot let go of the most meaningful time of his life) who is killed by someone else.  Newsome is hired by one of the town’s wealthiest citizens to edit his book, who will die himself and leave his fortune and property to Newsome to build his school.

The film is directed by Oscar Micheaux, who also co-produced and co-wrote the movie, which is a remake of his 1924 version.  That movie is considered lost, and it is interesting that both Alec Lovejoy and Carman Newsome are listed as being in that original cast, though in minor roles.

Though the acting is mostly stilted—except by the irate servant of the wealthy man who hires Newsome—irate because she does not want to serve breakfast to another Negro.  She’s a volcano of disgust, for he is, “Just as much spook as I am.”

Her reaction is only one aspect of the film that seems shocking for the day—the open illustration of racism and racial tensions, not only between Blacks and whites, but among the Black community that is divisive.  Some of the dialogue is crude.  A white man who says, “You can’t educate a Negro” more honestly attacks racism than the average mainstream movie that depicts a Black servant as dimwitted.

The wealthy man who hires Newsome and treats him well, still makes the insulting plea for Newsome to not marry Ethel Moses.  “You don’t want to marry a Negro…let your seed whither in your loins.  It’s better that way.” 

Miss Moses, distraught, tells Newsome, “They have no feelings for a colored girl, Peter. No, not a speck.  When one of us even walks down the street they whistle and say all kind of things out loud just as if we weren’t there at all…we just colored women.  They make you feel naked.”

When the sheriff comes to arrest her after an informant tails her, who is another Black man, the sheriff calls him “a black baboon.”

Skin color is commented on by the Blacks and used for insult and disparagement among themselves, and the whites are open in their condescension and racism.  When Newsome’s mother is dying, a white doctor refuses to help unless he is given ten dollars up-front.

The movie is missing its first 20 minutes, and the restored version summarizes the early sequences.  It is not a polished movie, there is certainly nothing of Hollywood glamour here (and a few scenes in a nightclub are diverting but detract from the plot), but is notable in that its unselfconscious ugly frankness would have been daring in a mainstream movie theater of the day.  It also features, unlike mainstream Hollywood films of the day, a fully integrated cast.  It would have opened the eyes of white audiences who were little exposed to the Black experience. It might have opened some hearts as well.

Wishing you a contemplative and celebratory Black History Month.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation.

 

 

Men Must Fight - 1933

Men Must Fight (1933) straddles the convictions of pacifism versus a willingness to go to war on provocation; it straddles a cinematic proclivity to predicting the future and yet carries forward anachronistic images to illustrate that future.  Mostly, it straddles the past and present: the former grim and the latter an airy illusion of modernity we weren’t living up to in 1933.

This is another in the films I’d like to examine this year made during the 1930s that represent our mindset and our pop culture of that pivotal decade.

The film begins during World War I, with a gentle and yet provocative shot of lovely English actress Diana Wynyard and Robert Young chatting in a charming, homey room in England, preparing to take leave from one another.  The director Edgar Selwyn handles this opening in a sensitive and tantalizing manner.  As the seconds and the chatty dialogue click by, we gradually realize they are lovers, and they are dressing, both preparing to return to wartime duties.  In another moment, as they dress, we see she is a nurse, and he is an American flyer.  We must pause a moment to reflect how handsome and charming Robert Young was in his early career, and what a remarkably confident and appealing nature he projects.  He is quite natural in an era where screen acting could still be quite mannered and even stilted.

Robert says he wants to marry her and we have it on good authority now that they have enjoyed a romantic tryst and are unmarried.  There is no discussion of mores of the time, only that she has anxiety that he may be killed in the war, and he brushes that off with boyish gallantry.

But he does die.  (Longtime readers of this blog will be aware that I give no warning of spoilers, I just spit them out, so you newcomers to the blog had better adjust or go out and come in again.)

In an abrupt scene, we see a plane crash, and the body is transported to Miss Wynyard’s hospital, and it is Robert Young, and he doesn’t make it.

We are shunted to another scene where Miss Wynyard is talking with an old friend, played by Lewis Stone.  He is an American officer as well, but has never met Robert Young.  However, he knows Diana well enough to help her get a transfer, and make a gentlemanly offer to marry her.  “You don’t want your baby born in an atmosphere like this.”

The movie has barely begun and we get Pre-Code shock after shock.  Diana Wynyard at first rejects Lewis Stone because she does not love him and it would not be fair to him, and he gallantly accepts that, but offers security for her and the child.

The war ends, and Diana remarks, “Thank God it’s over and it will never happen again.”  That was the general idea during The World War, however unfortunate and inaccurate a prediction that turned out to be.  We know now the sequel to The World War began in 1939, but this movie, filmed in 1933, projects ahead at this point to 1940 and war clouds gather ominously again.  It is, however, a fictional war and is not really a remarkable prediction of World War II, but is rather a reflection of the dichotomy between the extremely strong anti-war fervor that began after World War I and continued into the early 1930s and the beginnings of militarism around the globe—first with Mussolini in Italy in the 1920s, Hitler’s rise in Germany and becoming chancellor in January 1933, and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. These world events had us on tenterhooks—at least those who paid attention to world news—and pacifism, isolationism, nationalism all converged and began to make even the most unwilling take stances.  Eventually, they would take sides.

Lewis Stone, we may note, in the early scenes during the World War is given a very dark dye job to suggest he is a much younger man than we see him in the 1940 scenes, which is appropriate, but even with the dark hair, and even looking trim in his officer’s uniform, we might note he still looks too old for Diana Wynyard, but this is not mentioned and perhaps we are meant to take him for her contemporary.

By the 1940 scenes, he looks like our old friend Judge Hardy, and Diana is now made up to look middle-aged and matronly.  They are married, and her baby is now a grown man, who has never been told that Lewis Stone is not his father.

Played by Phillips Holmes, young Bob is a recent college graduate with a chemical engineering degree, who is returning to the U.S. from abroad with a new girlfriend on board, played by Ruth Selwyn (who in real life was the second wife of the director, Edgar Selwyn).  When she eventually goes to meet his folks, she brings her mother along—played by Hedda Hopper in her pre-gossip column days.

Lewis Stone is a bigwig in the American diplomatic service, Secretary of State, and Diana Wynyard is a peace advocate.  With them living in their Art Deco apartment in New York City is May Robson, the grandmother.  Miss Robson gets to make snappy remarks and get away with it.

Their butler, Albert, is played by Robert Greig, who played so many butlers in his career that he must have belonged to the union.  Perhaps my favorite is his turn as Joel McCrea’s butler in Sullivan’s Travels (1941), which we discussed here.

Diana Wynyard and Lewis Stone have a cozy, comfortable marriage, but trouble comes between them when a U.S. ambassador to a fictional nation called “Eurasia” is murdered and the United States finds itself on the brink of war.  The naval fleet is sent to confront Eurasia.  Diana wants Lewis Stone to resign his position, but he will not.  “I’m not obsessed with the fear that has haunted you all your life.   You’ve seen one war, you’ve seen the man you loved killed, and ever since you’ve been afraid of what might happen to his…”  He’s about to say “son,” but just then their boy Phillips Holmes enters and Diana shushes Lewis Stone.

She speaks at a pacifist rally, and he wants their boy, with his new degree, to enter the chemical engineering side of the war department because “Gas will win this war,” that it will kill not only soldiers but civilians as well.  While we know poison gas was one of the greatest horrors of World War I, it’s not being the weapon of choice in World War II makes the remark sound anachronistic, but not funny.

Lewis Stone is adamant, “Any talk of peace is not only cowardly, it’s treachery.”

Their cook, an immigrant, wants to go back to his homeland—Eurasia—to fight in its defense.  He sounds vaguely Italian, so we really don’t know where Eurasia is supposed to be.  Butler Greig gives him a boot.

One of the interesting attempts at imagining the future world of 1940 is the scenes where we see Diana Wynyard’s speech at the peace rally on television, and another scene where the characters talk on video phones.

Diana is heckled at the rally and fights break out.  Guards hustle her away to safety.  There is mob violence in the city, but Lewis Stone addresses it from their balcony, with their son’s girlfriend’s visiting brother, who is in uniform.  Mr. Stone uses the young soldier as a prop to show the crowd he is all for war.  The uniform calms the crowd and they cheer Lewis Stone for not being a pacifist.

Their boy, Phillips Holmes, however, is.  He has learned about the evils of warfare from his parents from an early age and he has no desire to join up or use his education to become a military chemical officer.  He is torn about what to do, and his girlfriend breaks up with him.  He wants to speak up about peace and his mother’s pacifist cause, but Lewis Stone intervenes in a surprisingly cruel way.

He will not let the son use his good name in the cause of promoting peace.  He tells him that he is not his real father and that he is not free to use in this way the surname that has been generously given to him.

“You have no moral right to use the name of Seward in the manner you propose or any other manner.”  Diana Wynyard cringes, she knows what’s coming.

Lewis Stone continues telling Phillips that he is illegitimate, “Your father was a brave man who died for his country.” He zealously pulls away the honor of his name and the security it represented to a much younger Diana Wynyard.

She tells the whole story to her son, who is now more torn than ever.

Men in uniform march in the streets, and the enemy from Eurasia bombs and burns New York City.  Diana Wynyard and her son’s girlfriend are caught in a cab that is blown up and overturned, but she’s not seriously injured.

Lewis Stone makes a prescient remark, “All those years we’ve sat around and waited. Talked about peace and disarmament.  It’s cost us lives of thousands of men. We weren’t prepared for a war like this.”

Phillips Holmes eventually decides to join up, not in the chemical corps with its ghastly poisons, but as a flyer, like his real father.

His mother is crushed, of course, and the hand of fate weighs heavy on her, to think of her son being a flyer like his father, Robert Young.

“Do you believe in this war?” she asks him.

“Of course not.  It’s a dirty rotten business,” he replies, but adds no less truthfully, “I’ve got to play the game.” 

His girlfriend takes him back, they are married, and in the final scene, the women are sitting on their New York City balcony watching warplanes, biplanes, flying overhead.  We have also gotten a glimpse of zeppelins. Nothing says future war like zeppelins.

May Robson remarks that the world should be run by women.  “Let the men crow and strut and fight and be ornamental.  Like roosters.  That’s the function of the male.”

The new young bride muses that if she ever has a child, he’ll never go through this, but May responds, “Fat lot you’ll have to say about it.  You’ll be just another mother.”

It is a wistful and sad ending, not terribly inspirational though one suspects a certain amount of inspiration was intended.

The movie is daring in so far as it can be; truthful in so far as it could presage the facts of another war, but it fails to give any guiding wisdom about what to do about extermination camps, atom bombs, and the total annihilation of total war.  It couldn’t, of course.  In 1933 we were still too innocent, despite the famed world-weary attitude of the Lost Generation, to imagine anything could be worse than what we had already experienced.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation.

 

 

 

 

Gabriel Over the White House - 1933

Gabriel Over the White House (1933) is an inventive fantasy and apparently, political commentary as well, that has resonance today.  What exactly the meaning or purpose of that commentary is never entirely clear, as there is a great deal of contradiction in ideals presented, and perhaps even a curious display of a lack of knowledge about civics and our political institutions.  There is no innocence about human nature, though, and this was a hallmark of Pre-Code films.  The tone of the movie is sly and sometimes hits hard.

Walter Huston is splendid as the lead, a newly inaugurated president taking the helm of the government during the worst of the early Great Depression years.  He is a freewheeling bachelor, romps with his young nephew played by Dickie Moore as though he were a child himself, and when a sexy, confident, coy woman stops by the White House to see him, he keeps his door open to her and makes up a staff job for her to keep her close.  We already know, even without Franchot Tone’s knowing look, that “Pendie,” played by Karen Morely, is Mr. Huston’s mistress.  He does not trouble to hide it.

Franchot Tone plays Huston’s secretary and presumably chief of staff.  The movie treats what we know about Oval Office appointments with a vague bending of the truth, even as Huston bends the rules, and that is a script writer’s device to funnel the audience into the story he wants to tell without being bogged down by factual details.  Since the movie is frankly a fantasy, there is no need to hold to the mundane facts about actual protocol or how government really works.

But the era is faithfully depicted—if not in a real timeline of events, rather, in the feelings of desperation of a demoralized populace, in angry crowds, in hopelessness.  In such desperate times as these, Walter Huston as president does not seem to be the right man for the job.  He is self-involved, somewhat immature, gleefully corrupt and easily manipulated by special interests, and sometimes astonishingly stupid, which may be the source of his callousness.  Given the actual quill pen (which was NOT the actual pen) that Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation to sign a new bill for a public works project for new sewers in Puerto Rico, Huston jokes flippantly about it, “Well, here goes for Puerto Rican garbage.”  He is coarse, but we may smile at his impishness.  On the other hand, one cannot help but think of another asinine president who threw rolls of paper towels at suffering Puerto Ricans.  He is also immature, gleefully corrupt and easily manipulated by special interests, and sometimes astonishingly stupid.

Mischa Auer plays a serious and disgusted reporter who tries to nail down the details of Huston’s platform, but there are none.  (I half expected Mr. Auer to break into a passionate verse of “Ochi Chornya,” but he’s saving that for director Gregory La Cava’s other movie, My Man Godfrey, which we discussed here.)

However, a change will soon come over the new president.  Huston rides in a short motorcade to an event, but he takes the wheel because he loves to drive himself.  Fast.  Enjoying the white-knuckled response of his Secret Service men, he floors it, trying to pull away from the rest of the staff and police escort in the car behind him, swerving on a winding country highway.  Finally, he loses control and the car flips over.  He is severely injured and near death.

He is kept in seclusion by his doctor for many days, and the public is kept in the dark about the nature of his injuries or details of the accident.  There is some worry about who will take over the reins of government—seemingly unaware that that is precisely why we have vice presidents.

Finally, Huston comes out of his coma—but he is a changed man.  Now serious, now intelligent, now with a sense of purpose.  Franchot Tone and Karen Morely see the change, and notice something supernatural about it.  Huston has been visited by the Angel Gabriel, who is now pulling the strings in Huston’s brain.

Restored to more vigor than he had before, Huston sets about curing the Depression, first by addressing a group of protestors—not unlike the Bonus Army, whose camp was burned out and members shot by Douglas MacArthur’s troops under President Herbert Hoover.

Then he single-handedly repeals the Eighteenth Amendment, getting rid of Prohibition, just as Congress would do under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but he also establishes government liquor stores to drive out the gangster bootleggers, who bomb the stores.  C. Henry Gordon (in one of an astonishing fourteen movies that year) is compelling as the smooth, sinister mobster in a few devilishly sneering closeups.  Huston fires his cabinet, gets rid of Congress, declares martial law, and has the mobsters shot by firing squad.

In his address, Huston declares that he is a dictator based on Thomas Jefferson’s ideas of democracy.  Here is obviously one of the ridiculous twists in logic, but Huston would not be the first politician, real or fake, then or now, to claim that his fascist intentions would have been applauded by the Founding Fathers. 

Franchot Tone and Karen Morely, meantime, have become romantically involved, but they need not worry about offending Huston.  He has bigger fish to fry, and the Angel Gabriel keeps him pretty busy.   Miss Morely is shot by racketeers, but recovers and Huston blesses their union.

Another bizarre and even troubling move by Huston is when he brings the world powers together during a radio broadcast to demonstrate his new military service—the United States Navy of the Air.  He will move for disarmament of former weapons, but will put billions into the military of the future, which apparently is going to be biplanes, whose pilots will pull a lever and drop a bomb on an enemy ship.  Huston arranges a demonstration, and bullies the foreign governments into paying their World War loans and reparations and promise not to rearm because if they do, we will fly biplanes over them and pull a lever and drop a bomb. 

He tells them and the radio microphones, “The next war will be the story of the failure of antiquated weapons and antiquated myths, of the horrifying destructiveness of the modern agencies of modern arms.  Armies and navies will be destroyed from the air.  And as these planes destroy armies and navies, they will destroy cities, they will destroy populations…the next war will depopulate the earth…invisible gasses, inconceivably devasting explosives.”  Well, he got that right, in part at least. The foreign leaders hurriedly agree to his Washington Covenant.

Now that the important work is done, the Angel Gabriel passes over Huston as in a shadow, and Huston dies.

Even more interesting than the twisting logic of this film, are the sometimes conflicting stories about it.  We know it had its genesis in a novel, but producer Walter Wanger, Democrat and Roosevelt supporter, brought the story to M-G-M head Louis B. Mayer, staunch Republican, under Wanger’s production company owned by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.  Hearst began his unsuccessful political career, including a failed bid for the presidency in 1904, as a Democrat, but as the years rolled by he became more conservative and isolationist, who supported Hitler and the Nazi Party.  Though he was an early Roosevelt supporter, he went to the dark side after 1934 and became his enemy.  We all know he was the prototype for Charles Foster Kane of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1940), but that’s another story.  It is reported that Mr. Mayer held the movie back until after Roosevelt’s inauguration, hoping to pin the stain of fascism on him, rather than on Hoover, as if the story is an examination of the current sitting president.

The political affiliations of these men have a lot to do with any discussion of Gabriel Over the White House today, and because production began during the Hoover administration, but was released just weeks after Roosevelt came into office, what is the message of the film?  Who is the finger of fascism being pointed at—the Democrats or the Republicans, and is dictatorial powers in an American President considered fascism at all, or is it merely what Thomas Jefferson would have liked and what the American people secretly want all along?  Was the film an effort to ingratiate fascism with the American people?  We know only that the movie disappeared quickly enough when by the mid 1930s, fascism appeared to be a clear and present danger at home and abroad.  There were no nice guy dictators.

We are living now in far more dangerous times, and the plot points or message—if there really is any message at all—in Gabriel Over the White House seem innocent in their supposing, though intriguing, and the finger-pointing at what it all means is irrelevant.  What it is, is fantasy in its purest form.  Any good story, fantasy or not, begins with “what if?” and this is a freedom of thought we should celebrate. 

What I admire about many films of the 1930s is the courageous introspection into their own contemporary times, warts and all, and experimenting with different ways of storytelling to do that. The escapist musicals have, I think, sometimes received the lion’s share of attention when movies of the 1930s are recalled as “getting us through the Depression.”  The black-and-white gritty and even grim films of the Dirty Thirties have special historical value, and in their own way, they got us through the Depression, too.

As much as I can this year, I’d like to examine more films of the 1930s that unselfconsciously illustrate their own times. 

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

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From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation.