All the King’s Men was the Best Picture winner of 1949, and what is interesting about this particular film is how it managed to be a best picture winner considering that it is a political movie. Nowadays, I don’t imagine too many movies about American politics would win Best Picture.

John Ireland plays a reporter who is asked to do a story on a politician who is causing a bit of a storm down state, where there is to be an election for city council. Ireland’s boss says it’s intriguing because “they say that he’s an honest man.” Sounds so unusual, apparently.

The reporter goes to town, where he meets Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford), who gives a speech on the street on how corrupt the local officials are -- basically, the usual stuff about how the council's relatives own the businesses in town, and receive favors from council members, etc. Of course, the council gets the police to shut the speech down, but not without a scuffle.

Stark, at this point, is a somewhat naive fellow, working on a law degree by correspondence, and hoping to make some difference in this little town. He is also a man who avoids the temptations of life, like alcohol, and lives quietly with his wife and adopted son. The reporter and Stark spend some time together, and the reporter starts to admire him, and even helps him out during the local election.

Stark loses the election, and it seems as if it is all over for the guy. However, Stark makes some ground when he finishes his law degree, and starts helping people, by selling himself as a lawyer for the common folk. Then tragedy strikes -- twelve children die as a result of a badly-constructed staircase, which collapses. During the funeral, people start gathering around Stark, saying that they should have listened to him the first time.

Later on, during the governor's election, the people on the incumbent’s campaign, including people who were part of the much-hated (by Stark, anyway) city council, figure that their guy is going to lose to the other guy, so they hit on the idea of impressing on Stark to run as a third candidate for governor. Stark doesn’t realize, but the plan is that the vote will be split between Stark and the other guy, allowing the incumbent to hold on to his post. The people around mark him as a naive fool who will go along with what people tell him -- they influence him to give dull speeches about “facts” and “statistics” that will skim enough of the vote off from the incumbent’s major competitor, but not give Stark’s own campaign much impact besides.

Soon, however, Stark does find out, and, interestingly enough, what results is a night of boozing, something he has never done before. One could take all this to mean that he is slowly being corrupted by the political process, as the next morning, he arrives at a carnival, completely baked and hung over, and gives a speech that ignites the crowd. His newfound attitude wins him the election, and, afterward, we see how corrupt this character becomes, even as he placates the citizens with political pork like free health care, new roads, and many other infrastructure projects.

Our reporter is involved throughout most of this, as he is hired by Stark during the governor’s election, and is by his side for the rest of the film. What is interesting is how the reporter slowly sees the light, even as he is seduced by the political process, and the money that he’s getting paid to do his job. But that’s nothing compared to his girlfriend, who, upon seeing Stark for the first time, succumbs to complete admiration, and soon starts sleeping with the guy, who like all of these sorts, promises that he’ll divorce his wife and dump the unhappy marriage. It gets even worse than that, but that’s all I say about the storyline for now.

Granted, being a Hollywood film, the story does get overdramatized and melodramatic, but I was still pretty impressed with how brutal the movie really is about politics. This can be seen as the opposite of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, where Jimmy Stewart was the naive, goodhearted Senator whose morals win the day -- here, we have a guy who gives off the image of the goodhearted guy, but who, in reality, is a fake. Actually, more accurately, he is self-deluded, because you don’t get the sense that the guy actually thinks he’s corrupt, or cheating the voters, or his own morals. The message seems to be that, no matter how good you think you are when you start out, you will be corrupted by the culture of politics, because human nature dictates that people in a position of power will abuse that power, and people who don’t have power will do all they can, or take advantage of whatever they can, to get it.

The message is cynical, and so are some of the individual scenes in the movie. Violent deaths in this movie are treated very flippantly, especially the truly shocking scene of the children’s deaths (although of course, all we see is a close up of the metal bar holding the stairwell, as it crumbles and falls down). The way Stark is able to win is seen in a cold, brutal fashion as well. Stark’s spark of genius, what allows him to win, is to appeal to the masses, to embrace the notion of populism, of the grass roots. He does this by calling them by their “rightful” name -- hicks, and by playing on their ignorance and poverty. He says that only a hick can help another hick, and appeals to them with promises that resemble a socialist agenda. Yet Stark acts like a Communist or a Fascist dictator, plastering his name on everything he played a role in, reminding everyone who made all these good things possible, and trying to squelch dissent in sneaky, possibly murderous ways.

The director, Robert Rossen, was one of the people who named names during the Communist blacklist during the 50’s, and it’s interesting that he, like Elia Kazan, produced films which became cinematic justifications for having such a blacklist. On the Waterfront is Kazan’s great justification of what he did, as he makes Marlon Brando a stand-in for Kazan’s own snitching (in the movie, it’s against a union boss, another example of socialism/communism). And Rossen makes All the King’s Men into a movie which says that a guy who promises to be fair to the little guy, to put a socialist agenda into a capitalist society, is really a corrupt person. I’ll be fair and say that totally bashing concepts like unionism, free health care, and the like feels pretty disingenuous (coming from Canada, I’m quite used to socialized health care, and would much rather that then paying hundreds of dollars just for a check-up -- many Americans can’t afford decent health care, and why is that fair?). But I’m just reviewing the movies, and I think it’s fun to think about why certain movies are made -- and the movies themselves are great, anyway, regardless of politics.

For an intense, cynical, and, for its day, at least, somewhat shocking political drama, All the King’s Men is a classic choice. Broderick Crawford gives a great performance as the easily corruptible politician, and the movie has an admirable coldness and lack of sappiness and the like that might make it more appealing to today’s audiences.





Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening