The fight of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst and filmmaker Orson Welles for
Citizen Kane
is a Hollywood legend. The press mogul, against a young prodigy for a film that, rather than ridicule him, undressed him.
David Fincher's
Mank
,
nominated for 10 Oscars, explores the prelude to these events, reassessing the role of Welles and exploring Hearst's use of cinema as a political tool. However, before banquets with Herman J. Mankiewicz at San Simeon, the man who inspired Charles Foster Kane's character produced a reactionary political fantasy called
The Awakening of a Nation
, directed by Gregory de la Cava in 1933.
The film was a co-production of MGM - whose relationship between its president, Louis B. Mayer, and Hearst is reflected in Fincher's feature film - and the businessman's own production company, Cosmopolitan Productions.
The filming was done in two weeks and a month before the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as president.
This was no coincidence.
Hearst had supported Roosevelt's nomination and, as a
2018
article by Jeff Greenfield in
Politico indicates
, the Californian businessman intended the play to serve as a message to the newly elected president: Perhaps a dictatorship was necessary to end the Great Depression.
Walter Huston in 'The Awakening of a Nation.' Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
The irresistible rise of Judson Hammond
The story centers on Judson Hammond (Walter Huston, father of John Huston), an
establishment
puppet
, tied to favors and favoritism, and who ignores those most affected by the Great Depression or organized crime that emerged as a result of the Dry Law. A car accident causes him to go into a coma, and when he awakens his personality has changed to the point that people close to him begin to believe that he is under some kind of heavenly guidance or possession. The idea is
never explained in great detail, beyond its English title:
Gabriel Over The White House
(
Archangel Gabriel at the White House
).
The president, under divine inspiration, faces a crowd of unemployed veterans looking like extras from
The Grapes of Wrath
marching on the United States capital. It recruits them and the entire jobless and homeless population for a "construction army" where enlisted men will receive food, red goods and accommodation "like armies in time of war." When his cabinet opposes his economic measures, Hammond asks them to resign. Once Congress begins the
impeachment
process
, the president suspends the legislature and assumes full control of the Government under a state of emergency.
The ruler defends himself with one of the various speeches he gives throughout the film and which, according to various sources, were written by Hearst himself: "I believe in democracy like Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, and if what I will do in The name of the people makes me a dictator, so it is a dictatorship based on Jefferson's definition of democracy: a government for the greatest good of the greatest number ”.
Hammond revokes Prohibition with the creation of liquor stores, forms a paramilitary police that persecutes and prosecutes gangsters in military courts "to avoid criminal bureaucracy and return to basics." In a memorable sequence, a group of gangsters are shot in front of the Statue of Liberty. Hammond's handling of foreign policy is just as subtle, with an international conference convened on a yacht in which representatives of the world's powers watch the latest American bombers destroy a fleet and are exhorted to sign a global disarmament treaty. called the Washington Pact. Once the president finishes signing the treaty, he collapses and dies shortly after, having fulfilled his divine mission.
A group of gangsters about to be shot after passing a court martial in 'Awakening of a Nation' Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
The conspiracy against Roosevelt
Awakening of a Nation
was an awkward movie from the start.
James Wingate, who headed the reviewing body that preceded the implementation of the censorship codified in the Hays Code, told his bosses that he considered the feature film "dangerous" and that it could foment violence against the Government.
The
Variety
review
at the time called it "a political racket disaster" and praised Huston's performance for being "so persuasive that viewers will be scammed into accepting his monstrous excesses."
The New York Times
, meanwhile, rescued that it was "interesting for the times in which we live."
The narrator of the
Citizen Kane
newscast
that serves as a biography of the protagonist comments that "there was no public figure who supported or denounced, or who supported and later denounced." This is what ended up happening between Hearst and Roosevelt. The media mogul joined the line of businessmen denouncing the president and the
New Deal
from the right. Three years after the premiere of
The Awakening of a Nation
, in 1936, it branded him in its main newspaper as a communist who was implementing Marxism in the United States.
Roosevelt's clash with the private sector reached the point that a conspiracy financed by a group of powerful businessmen to recruit unemployed veterans to remove him from power was denounced, although it is unknown how true or achievable these plans were. What is certain is that the film, at the time it was a modest success for his study and he forgot when the idea of a fascist dictatorship became unpopular, has resonated in recent years. The idea of the all-powerful president, free from legislative shackles, purging the
establishment
while restoring the country's greatness from the hands of society's forgotten no longer seems so far away in post-Trump America.
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