The following night was Gabriel Over the White House, part of that same New Yorker series. I didn’t feel like going, but Michael insisted I shouldn’t miss it. It’s a film, he said, that’s rarely screened and not easy to see, so that night I walked again down to Yerba Buena Gardens, this time to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts at the other end of the park, another glassy building but smaller and less pretentious.

It is, indeed, a strange film, released in the strange and pivotal year of 1933. Walter Huston plays a Depression-era president who, guided by some supernatural force, becomes a combination of FDR, Woodrow Wilson, and Hitler.

Today, in the era of streaming and YouTube, GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE is a much easier film to find and watch, and even more disturbing given both the world of 1933 and the world of 2025.