Financial and industrial titans meet. Led by a lazily malign Charley Grapewin, they decide on war, which will make them lots of money. They have Congress sewn up. Even though President Arthur Byron is steadfastly against war, there are enough votes to over-ride his veto. And so the bill passes both Houses, and the President steps out for a walk on the White House grounds and disappears. All business of government stops -- there being no 25th Amendment yet -- and Secretary of War Edward Arnold is put in charge of the investigation. Is the President dead or alive? Who grabbed him? Is it the Gray Shirts, led by megalomaniacal Edward Ellis? Communists? Half-witted delivery boy Andy Devine?
If this seems like a mystery movie, it's because it's based on a book that was published anonymously, but later turned out to have been written by Rex Stout. Clearly ancestral to political thrillers like Seven Days In May, its contemporaries in the field were those which toyed with fascism as a good idea, like GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE. Although when it comes to good guys versus bad guys, director William Wellman, and his writers, Carey Wilson, Ben Hecht, and Charles MacArthur were going to side with peace and the little guy.
What's most remarkable about this movie is that it's 80% older men talking, yet it's always very cinematic. Credit cameraman Barney McGill and editor Hanson Fritsch, as well as performances by actors you've seen a hundred times, but here they turn up the wattage, often until they seem insane, like Ellis, or oily like Osgood Perkins.
If this seems like a mystery movie, it's because it's based on a book that was published anonymously, but later turned out to have been written by Rex Stout. Clearly ancestral to political thrillers like Seven Days In May, its contemporaries in the field were those which toyed with fascism as a good idea, like GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE. Although when it comes to good guys versus bad guys, director William Wellman, and his writers, Carey Wilson, Ben Hecht, and Charles MacArthur were going to side with peace and the little guy.
What's most remarkable about this movie is that it's 80% older men talking, yet it's always very cinematic. Credit cameraman Barney McGill and editor Hanson Fritsch, as well as performances by actors you've seen a hundred times, but here they turn up the wattage, often until they seem insane, like Ellis, or oily like Osgood Perkins.