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This is a very strange movie, and was on again last night at midnight. It is a story about a totally corrupt Party hack who gets elected thanks to some votes that suddenly popped up in Alabama--("Wait'll you get the bill," says the operative who delivered them)--who has no interests other than selfish personal and financial-gain, who goes driving like an idiot to avoid reporters, and crashes. Many notes of corruption and lack of interest toward the grim problems of the country, (at the very time the movie was made, having sunk into Depression and widespread unemployment), are given: the new President has a lover, who is put on the payroll as a "secretary," nothing the President says is to be used for publication, there are huge crowds of lobbyists everywhere, the President plays with a nephew on the floor while a pleading speech by the leader of a March on Washington of the poor is heard on the radio, etc.
The President's injuries from the car crash seem to be life-threatening, and produce a coma that last for days. During that time, the Angel Gabriel comes to the room--(very nicely and subtly done, with only light-change effects, not a character)--and the President awakes totally changed. This is where the movie becomes very odd; it is a fantasy, but there are parts that are like what actually happened later! The President is now the voice of the people, its conscience, and is determined to help the suffering and fight the corruption the President was once part of. The threat of gangsters is partly solved by legalizing alcohol again, there are "W.P.A." type programs to put people to work in their fields and get the economy going again (I don't know how much of what would be the New Deal was announced yet), and new banking regulations to insure savings, etc. Things improve, then the leader of the unemployed--the sequence of their march being met with violence was exactly like the response of Hoover to the Bonus Army of unemployed veterans of WWI--is murdered. The President, to get these programs going, and get rid of oppostion, starts suspending laws, then even suspends the Congress, and starts acting as a dictator, but all to do the good of solving the Depression (this is all presented favorably, as if a message to the new President, who of course, would be Roosevelt). Remember, the horrific threat of Hitler and the genocidal Japanese Army were not yet known threats, but just rising to power.
The President, now realizing that the war debt owed by Europe to us, from WWI, will never be repaid as long as Depression increases, and since it cannot be repaid because all Nations are still spending more on armaments and preparation for war, than on domestic issues, threatens them with the size and scope of our armed forces, to get them to stop spending their money on war, but on repayment of the debt, and on social programs to solve the economic crisis. The President then destroys our own battleships in front of the assembled world leaders, as a show of good faith and an example. The message is that the threat of war, a new world war, still hangs over them all as the worst threat to recovery from Depression. They agree and sign a pact. The President, now a world hero, has a stroke and dies (even to the tune of "Coming Home," so associated with Roosevelt's death, years later!).
This is a very strange movie with a very strange atmosphere, that was banned from TV for many decades (like "Duck Soup" with the Marx Brothers), and only the past few years brought back to the public, both by TCM. There is also an interesting chapter on this movie and the problems with its script, changes, etc., in the book "Hollywood Censored," by Gregory D. Black.
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