ABSTRACT
Paramount studios released The President Vanishes penned by Rex Stout, who would later become known for authoring the famous Nero Wolfe detective series. The President Vanishes presents a different sort of conversion narrative, not one person becoming another, but more mysteriously, a transformation from presence to absence, as the executive body disappears altogether. Dramatizing a peculiar alternative to dictatorship, The President Vanishes in this regard clearly comments on Gabriel over the White House, particularly on the key question of presidential power: where it is located and how it is exercised. Quick-fire cross-cutting between scenes is a common convention in classical Hollywood storytelling, a visual "panorama" that effortlessly lends itself to cinematic adaptation. The consequences of such a calculated, more extended withdrawal from public life would become the central conceit of The President Vanishes. Only after the president vanishes can martial law be declared, a dictatorial move by proxy that temporarily freezes the plot against America.
