ignatz928 Review of All the King's Men

All the King's Men (1949)

A good political movie that only comes up short against the original

[7/10 · 10 August 2005]

I decided to watch this movie after reading and enjoying the Robert Penn Warren novel on which it was based. As a companion piece to the book the film inevitably disappoints, but taken on its own terms it's a fairly good movie. Both book and film tell the story of Willie Stark, a man who begins as an idealistic, rural lawyer crusading against political corruption in his (unspecified) state, but only gains power after he turns into a cynical demagogue, as seen through the eyes of Jack Burden, the black sheep of a wealthy family, a former reporter, and Stark's right-hand man. The difference is in the emphasis; the book's focus is really on Burden, and his moral development as seen in relation to the polar opposition of the pragmatic, Machiavellian Stark and the unbending, idealistic doctor Adam Stanton. Of course, Burden's moral struggles take place largely in his own mind, and as such don't lend themselves easily to filming. Probably sensibly, the movie chooses to focus mainly on Stark's political rise and moral decline, with Burden's role reduced to more of an audience surrogate than a character in his own right. No one in the cast sounds very Southern, giving the movie a somewhat timeless, disassociated feeling. Still, the filmmakers convincingly evoke a world of back –country towns and back room politics, with little of the glamor associated with Hollywood films of this period. The performers are excellent, if also fairly vague in terms of background. Broderick Crawford's Stark is convincing both as a naive country lawyer and a cynical demagogue, and John Ireland effectively portrays the moral struggles of Jack Burden. Mercedes McCambridge, who I'd previously seen in the unlikely role of a lesbian Mexican gang member in Touch of Evil, is more ideally cast here as Stark's tough-minded adviser Sadie Burke. Warren claimed that the book was partly inspired by the similarities he saw between Huey Long and Mussolini. Understandably for a post-WWII movie, Rossen's adaptation pumps up the references to fascism and makes Stark a much more clear-cut villain. He has his own private army of black-shirt style, leather jacket-wearing cops, stages a political rally that looks like a small-scale version of Nuremberg, and by the end is even revealed to have ordered an assassination. Unfortunately, Rossen's changes oversimplify the book and greatly reduce the impact of Stark's climatic assassination by Adam Stanton, which Warren intended as a tragic clash of opposites, but becomes here a simple case of a tyrant getting his just deserts. Though the movie tries to deal with the issues of pragmatism versus idealism, it too easily dismisses the representative of idealism out of hand. The novel's Stark was not an admirable man, but he also could not be completely dismissed- by Burden or by the reader- in the context of a state hopelessly mired in corruption. Still, I don't want to completely dismiss the movie, which on its own terms is an effective political drama that successfully captures the smoky back-room atmosphere of old-time American politics.