Eventually he takes control of the government, solves the problems of the nation, from unemployment to racketeering, and arranges for worldwide peace, before dying of a heart attack.

It was directed by Gregory La Cava, produced by Walter Wanger[2] and written by Carey Wilson based upon the novel Rinehard: A Melodrama of the Nineteen-Thirties (1933) by Thomas Frederic Tweed.

Amiable but corrupt U.S. President 'Judd' Hammond (Walter Huston) tells his new secretary Harley “Beek” Beekman (Franchot Tone) that two people may be admitted to his presence at any time: his young nephew Jimmie (Dickie Moore) and Miss Pendola "Pendie" Molloy (Karen Morley).

Weeks later, Eastman confides in Beekman and Molloy: the supposedly comatose President is perfectly fine, but is a changed man who sits silently, reading and thinking, “like a gaunt gray ghost".

In Baltimore, the President walks into the crowd alone and tells Alice Bronson (Jean Parker) that her father was a martyr who died trying “to arouse the stupid, lazy people of the United States to force their government to do something before everybody slowly starves to death.” He promises to create an Army of Construction.

The first U.S. Government Liquor Store is bombed, and machine gun fire rakes the White House, gravely wounding Pendie just as she and Beekman are about to confess their love.

Huston's performance in the film was highly praised, in spite of the fact that the cosmetics used to make him look younger in the scenes of Lincoln's youth had a comical effect.

In a piquant detail, Bernstein reports, “When Wanger, a staunch Roosevelt supporter, approached [the producer Irving] Thalberg about his differences with Mayer over politics and production ideas, Thalberg had told Wanger, ‘Don’t pay any attention to him.’” ... Rather, Wanger faced an even higher authority—the censorious Hays Code office, which required some changes, even some reshoots that blunted some of the sharpest political satire.”[8] “One of the reasons for the movie’s impact is its direction, by Gregory La Cava, who is one of the most distinctive of Hollywood talents of the nineteen-thirties and early forties... He’s essentially a comic director, but one whose sense of humor is laced with dark and poignant melodrama.

In “Gabriel,” Hammond comes off not as a stuffy and out-of-touch grandee such as Hoover, but as a free-swinging, superannuated vestige of the Jazz Age, a character from Fitzgerald in the era of Steinbeck.

La Cava's direction of Huston is kaleidoscopically dazzling; together, they turn the abstractions of straw-figure advocacy into an emotionally intricate and ever-surprising character.

Hammond's quasi-divine possession comes off as a sort of distanced madness, a fury that grips him not at all blindly; he calmly and unapologetically observes himself rising—or going deeper—into world-historical grandeur.

In the presence of radio microphones and world leaders, Hammond delivers a wild speech (dictated by Hearst), that, in its utopian and histrionic extremes, foreshadows the climactic oration by Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator even as the specifics of the principled power-grab at the core of the film seem downright fascistic.”[8] Although an internal MGM synopsis had labeled the script "wildly reactionary and radical to the nth degree," studio boss Louis B. Mayer "learned only when he attended the Glendale, California preview that Hammond gradually turns America into a dictatorship" writes film historian Barbara Hall.

It described the film as “A mess of political tripe superlatively hoked up into a picture of strong popular possibilities...a cleverly executed commercial release... Huston plays the part so persuasively that witnessers will be tricked into accepting its monstrous exaggerations.” Tone and Morley “carry what amount to walk-on parts and make them look like leads.“[4] Reviewing it on April 1, 1933, Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times observed “It is a curious, somewhat fantastic and often melodramatic story, but nevertheless one which at this time is very interesting.

Depending on your perspective, it's a strident defense of democracy and the wisdom of the common man, a good argument for benevolent dictatorship, a prescient anticipation of the New Deal, a call for theocratic governance, and on and on.

[12]In a 2018, article for Politico, Jeff Greenfield suggests that the film “offers us significant insights into what tempts countries to travel down an authoritarian road.” “Rushed into production with the financial help of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst... it was designed as a clear message to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that he might need to embrace dictatorial powers to solve the crisis of the Great Depression.

"[14] "An aroma of fascism clung to the heavily edited release print", according to Leonard Leff, co-author of The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship and the Production Code .

Newsreel film of the Royal Navy was spliced into the yacht sequence in the British version, implying that both Britain and the United States were cooperating to obtain disarmament.