Three reasons to see ALL THE KING'S MEN; Plus: Seven Years of Georgie Bush..
Written: Feb 13 '00 (Updated Mar 23 '08)
Product Rating:
Pros: A film which led to today's frank depictions of American Politics. Mercedes McCambridge; Broderick Crawford.
Cons: It has not aged well in the wake of more realistic films produced since.
The Bottom Line: ALL THE KING'S MEN, despite the recent remake with Sean Penn as Willie Stark, remains the best adaptation of our finest political novel. That says something about its overall power.
[Update: 10/7/04 -- Given the events of the last four years; given that half the American People seem to be hypnotized by a Media Circus, and poised to perhaps re-elect a fraudulent Southern Populist in the facade of George W. Bush, I have decided to give ALL THE KING'S MEN a fourth star. It CAN happen here!]
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[Update: 04/10/05 -- Location shooting in Louisiana has just been completed on a remake of ALL THE KINGS MEN, starring Sean Penn as Willie Stark, Jude Law as Jack Burden, Frances McDormand as Sadie Burke and Scarlett Johannson as Ann Burden.
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UPDATE: 10/6/06 -- The returns are in, and the re-make of ALL THE KING'S MEN lost Big Time. The film was evidently extensively re-shot and re-edited after the above report, with Patricia Clarkson and Kate Winslett replacing McDormand and Johannson -- never a good sign. The director, who helped ruin the impact of SCHINDLER'S LIST, evidently does not have much emotional taste. The film should have been great, and everyone agrees that it is not.
Stay with Robert Rossen, Brod Crawford, and Mercedes McCambridge!
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I shall spend a few more than 100 words on ALL THE KING'S MEN (1949). The three reasons to see it are: 1) It is a landmark film, 2) Mercedes McCambridge as Sadie Burke and 3) Broderick Crawford as Willie Stark.
Is the film Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize Novel? No, one is advised to read that first and best modern novel about pure (or impure) American politics, but the film does capture the essence of the book. Does it strike one as a realistic picture of our political system, even in the old South? No, certainly not after recent masterpieces like ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN (Pakula, 1976), *JFK (Stone, 1991) and NIXON (Stone again, 1995). These films, while full of stylization, give us a vomiting vision of American Politics in illegal operation. ALL THE KING'S MEN, like the novel on which it is based, is almost a nostalgic epic poem on what Warren, at least, thought once our political system was, and what he feared it would become.
On the latter conclusion, he was correct in thinking that the drift toward fascism would continue, and so was Writer/Director Robert Rossen, a forgotten figure now, brought down by illness and his own political cowardice. Rossen between 1937 and 1949 wrote such other strong films as MARKED WOMAN, THEY WON'T FORGET, THE ROARING TWENTIES, THE SEA WOLF, A WALK IN THE SUN; co-wrote (uncredited) THE *TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE and (with Abraham Polonsky) BODY AND SOUL which he also directed. He had the guts to produce, write and direct a ALL THE KING'S MEN, which showed how politics, North and South, really worked not so long ago; a film that, at the time of its release, was almost guaranteed to be banned; box office poison in half the nation.
Rossen gambled his visualization of the novel would stir the public, and he won.
Then, he walked into a McCarthy Period kangaroo court, had a heart attack and fell apart for the rest of his career.
Rossen's direction, even his writing, may be faulted; the editing feels dated in parts; it is in black and white. But whoever picked Radio Actress Mercedes McCambridge (another Orson Welles discovery) to play political operative and "hatchet woman" Sadie Burke was a genius! To this day the unstated abuse of her childhood sweats bitterly out of her smallpox marked face. You can smell the sour gas of her ulcer, taste the Tums. The demon-driven energy of her performance won her an Academy Award, in her first motion picture, and she earned it!
As for Broderick Crawford, son of Comedienne Helen Broderick and of a long theatrical tradition, even older folk tend to remember him stumbling around muttering "ten-4, ten-4" on TV's "Highway Patrol." We forget the strong young ex-seaman who created the part of Lennie in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men on Broadway, and then came to Hollywood to play amiable sidekicks and ingratiating gangsters for ten years, until someone gave him the role of his lifetime.
Willie Stark, based on the life of Governor (and U.S. Senator) Huey P. Long of Louisiana, is an embodiment of much that is right and wrong with our system. The film shows us Willie the Idealist, a farm boy who wants to bring food and education to the poor from whom he came, and how he becomes disillusioned when his plans are thwarted and co-opted by the entrenched wealth in his state. Despite his longing to do good and his thirst for respectability, he turns to fascist methods, becomes venal and corrupt. And he is applauded and puffed up for the populist circus he creates so that, before he is assassinated at the end of the film, he has sullied his ideals, alienated many of those who believed in him, destroyed the one aristocratic family he admired, and has come to rule his state as if it were a minor dictatorship. And by then, Willie Stark is an uneasy step away from running for President of the United States.
[I would not make all the petty, paranoid connections some members of the William Jefferson Clinton Lynching Committee may see, but there are certainly some parallels with the political career and life of Willie Stark.]
Does Broderick Crawford chew scenery as Willie Stark? Yes, indeed, but so did Huey Long! Crawford won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Crawford took the unlikely role (for him) of a Southern Populist and made it his own. Since 1949, we have elected a movie actor President, that Southern Populist from Hope, Arkansas; and some citizens are considering a professional wrestler in 2004 as Bill Clinton's successor. Welcome to the new America!
[04/10/05 -- In 2000, of course, we rang the bell. We elected the scion of Eastern millionaire plutocrats, posing as a Texas evangelical populist. The inevitable consequences are becoming obvious.]
Yes, ALL THE KING'S MEN is creaky. The crowd scenes that were hailed for their realism in 1949 now look staged, but it is no accident that people felt the power of them in their time. No accident that ALL THE KING'S MEN won an Academy Award for Best Picture. No one in America had presented our system going wrong like that on the screen before. It lit the way for ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, NIXON and, yes, PRIMARY COLORS.
The basic question, for which ALL THE KING'S MEN provides an uneasy answer, remains and continues to fester: Can a democracy survive in which the majority of citizens prefer to have a dictatorial leader, so that they will not have to fulfill their part of the social contract upon which democracy depends?
It does not look good.
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UPDATE -- October 3, 2002 -- Well, the people began to see through Governor/wrestler Jesse Ventura, and he wisely decided not to run again. But we did elect a faux populist governor from Texas, who had the folksy, plain talking ways of a Willie Stark; a President who has made the following statements:
1. "You don't get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier." Describing what it's like to be governor of Texas. (Governing Magazine 7/98)
2. "I told all four that there are going to be some times where we don't agree with each other, but that's OK. If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator," Bush joked. http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0012/18/nd.01.html(12/18/2000 CNN.com)
3. "A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it, " [Bush] said. 7/27/2001 Associated Press.
The scenario that ALL THE KING'S MEN suggested, in certain circumstances, might come about is still in play.
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