Rated: Unrated
Starring: Broderick Crawford, John Ireland, et al.
Director: Robert Rossen
Review
Writer-director Robert Rossen and character actors
Broderick Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge (in her film debut) took home
Oscars (for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Supporting Actress,
respectively) for this excellent adaptation of Robert Penn Warren's
Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Crawford stars as Willie Stark, a
charismatic populist Southern politician (inspired by the real Louisiana
Governor Huey Long) who belies his "man of the people" roots as he
ruthlessly maneuvers, lies, and deals his way into the halls of power.
John Ireland is his right-hand man, Jack Burden, a newsman turned
political flack who hangs on to Stark's early idealism even in the face of
Stark's most reprehensible acts of corruption. McCambridge is Stark's cool
mistress come calculating assistant. The immediacy of the drama is due in
part to a documentary-like style, notably in the scenes on the campaign
trail where Stark sways crowds with his folksy rhetoric and estimable
charm. Joanne Dru and John Derek also costar. Rossen's savage screenplay
and firm direction give the film a powerful punch, but it's Crawford's
blustery charm and oversized performance that carry the picture. --Sean
Axmaker
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"All the King's Men" turns Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer
Prize winning novel into the role of a lifetime for Oscar winning Best
Actor Broderick Crawford. The story is inspired, for lack of a better
word, by the real life and times of Huey P. Long, the infamous Louisiana
politician who seemed intent on adapting fascism to American politics.
Director Robert Rossen also wrote the adaptation of the celebrated novel,
and ultimately it is Rossen who deserves the credit for the film's power.
There is an intensity to the film, beginning with the torchlight
processions, campaign barbecues and banners for Stark that we see behind
the opening credits. When Stark is finally revealed to us in a rapid-fire
sequence showing him at a football stadium, speaking to a crowd at the
fair, steamrolling legislators, posing for photographs with his family,
there is a vitality that presents the political figure of Stark as an
utterly American political figure. The only problem with this film, at
least for me, is that the transformation of Willie Stark from the hick
lawyer with a sincere concern for the plight of the downtrodden into a
drunken, egomaniacal dictator once he has tasted power. The change is too
sudden, just like the assassin's bullet that cuts Stark down at the end,
so that instead of becoming a tragic figure (a good man gone wrong), we
are left wondering who is the real Stark and forced to conclude it is the
original naive do-gooder that was the sham. However, once we jettison the
character's roots, there is no arguing that this is not a compelling
political narrative and the fact that the true story of Huey P. Long again
proves that fact is stranger than fiction should not really enter into the
equation.
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