SEVEN MOVIE PRESIDENTS GONE BAD.

Missing from the list, the 1933 film financed by William Randolph Hearst with FDR as technical advisor, and more recently name-dropped in Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, Walter Huston’s Gabriel Over the White House:

The legendary media tycoon William Randolph Hearst believed America needed a strongman and that Franklin D. Roosevelt would fit the bill. He ordered his newspapers to support FDR and the New Deal. At his direction, Hearst’s political allies rallied around Roosevelt at the Democratic convention, which some believe sealed the deal for Roosevelt’s nomination.

But all that wasn’t enough. Hearst also believed the voters had to be made to see what could be gained from a president with a free hand. So he financed the film Gabriel Over the White House, starring Walter Huston. The film depicts an FDR look-alike president who, after a coma-inducing car accident, is transformed from a passive Warren Harding type into a hands-on dictator. The reborn commander-in-chief suspends the Constitution, violently wipes out corruption, and revives the economy through a national socialist agenda. When Congress tries to impeach him, he dissolves Congress.

The Library of Congress summarizes the film nicely. “The good news: He reduces unemployment, lifts the country out of the Depression, battles gangsters and Congress, and brings about world peace. The bad news: He’s Mussolini.”

Or “FDR on speed,” as one wag at the Independent Film Channel described the film in 2010. But then as Jonah noted above, FDR likely viewed the movie as a coming attractions preview for his administration. Or as Gene Healy, the author of The Cult of the Presidency says in the CATO Institute’s version of the popular “Trailers From Hell” YouTube series, “I think by the end of FDR’s 12 years, you really see a presidency that’s something like reality imitating fiction:”

[vimeo 2058075]

(For what it’s worth, Huston would later go on to star in the infamous 1943 pro-Soviet Union propaganda film also commissioned by FDR, Mission to Moscow.)