The Academy Awards choice for Best Film of 1949 follows naive backwoods reformer Willie Stark (a thickly fictionalized senator Huey Long), picked by a rival candidate for State Governor to "split the hick vote". But when he realizes how he's been used, Stark doesn't just get mad; he gets even, organizing a ruthless political machine that eventually consumes him. Watching Oscar winner Broderick Crawford transform the character from honest do-gooder to populist demagogue is electrifying, but it's a shame this adaptation of Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize winning novel had to lean so hard on pulp fiction melodrama, beginning with the familiar crutch of voice-over commentary, and from a rather bland protagonist: journalist John Ireland, trapped on the Willie Stark bandwagon. The point is well made and worth repeating: politicians can't use bad money for good deeds without being strangled by all the strings attached, but the message is lost between all the juicy plot twists: a suicide, an assassination, an auto accident crippling the Governor's star quarterback son, so forth and so on.
Review of All the King's Men
