A curious depression fantasy in which Walter Huston plays a crook who, after being elected President of the United States, experiences a vision of the Archangel Gabriel while recovering from an automobile accident, and is thereby inspired to proclaim himself dictator. “Something after the fashion of a Lincoln” (NY Times), he is determined to abolish racketeering, eliminate unemployment, and create world peace. While tonight's viewers might recognize assorted (fantastic) presidential traits presaged in the 1933 film - the gangster Chief Executive who delights in driving his car at 100 m.p.h., for example - the tactics of the Superpresident were perhaps intended as something less than pure fantasy. William K. Everson places the film among “a small but quite powerful group of near-Fascist films of the early '30s, offshoots of the gangster cycle...” and comments:

“Louis B. Mayer made no secret of his antagonism to Roosevelt and his administration, and there are signs of Mayer's personal tamperings with the script here. Both the ‘party-man' President of the opening reel, and the ‘enlightened' President of the bulk of the film are given lines, situations and clues which suggest identification with some of the less laudatory Roosevelt traits; but basically of course no clearly defined identification is intended. The film is political melodrama in the framework of fantasy, startling in the proffered solutions (views held by many at that time) and startling too in the topicality, 47 years later, of many of its political and social problems.”