Gabriel Over the White House -- February 15, 2021

listal.com

Happy Presidents' Day, everyone.

Gabriel Over the White House is a strange film that was shot in February and March,1933 after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president and before he was sworn in. Greg La Cava directed it, based on an anonymous novel by TF Tweed. William Randolph Hearst put up the money and contributed at least one speech.  

Walter Huston, who had played Abraham Lincoln a few years before, was newly elected President Judd Hammond. Hammond is a machine politician who operates on giving and getting favors. He was driving his own car and was hurt badly in an accident. When he came out of his coma, he had changed. Apparently under the influence of the Angel Gabriel and the spirit of Abraham Lincoln, he became an active president who tried to help people. 

At the same time, he seemed to adopt some fascist practices, sending a special police unit with armored cars to attack criminal mobsters. They get tried before a military tribunal and then shot. 

After bringing peace to the world by strong arming other leaders, he dies. 

Motion Picture Herald, 20-May-1933

Voices -- July 25, 2020

Motion Picture News, 03-July-1920

I don't know anything about the 1920 feature Voices, but I like the trade ad.  I don't know anything about writer/director Chester De Vonde, except that he wrote the play Kongo.  Lon Chaney starred in a silent version called West of Zanzibar. Walter Huston starred in the talkie remake, Kongo.

DW Griffith's Abraham Lincoln -- February 12, 2016

www.listal.com

Happy 207th birthday to Abraham Lincoln, our greatest president.  DW Griffith's first all-talkie movie was DW Griffith's Abraham Lincoln, from a script by Stephen Vincent Benet and starring Walter Huston.  I grew up reading books that said it was terrible.  I finally got to see it when a San Francisco UHF station bought a package of old movies that had not been on the air for a long time.

I thought Walter Huston was very good.  There were other interesting actors like Jason Robards, Sr and Ian Keith, who played the coward Booth with a big mouthful of scenery.  Henry B Walthall, the Little Colonel in Griffith's Birth of a Nation, played a Colonel.  The movie didn't have a story.  It was more like series of tableaux. 

New Movie, November, 1930

=============================

Picture of the Week will appear tomorrow.