All the King's Men

All the King's Men (released November 8, 1949)
Director: Robert Rossen
Starring: Broderick Crawford, John Ireland, Joanne Dru, John Derek, Mercedes McCambridge
Produced by: Robert Rossen
Written by: Robert Rossen, based upon the novel by Robert Penn Warren
Music by: Louis Gruenberg
Cinematography: Burnett Guffey
Distributed by: Columbia Pictures

Really Bad Eggs

I mentioned in my post on The English Patient that I often have issues with books that have been turned into movies. For All the King’s Men, this was mostly the case. I read the book in 2007 when I was leading a Pulitzer book discussion series. This was the fourth and last in the series. Robert Penn Warren won the prize in 1947, and the film with the same name won the Academy Award for Best Picture two years later.

Usually the book/movie sequence happens like this for me: I read a book. I love it. Hollywood turns it into a movie. I see the movie and am greatly disappointed. For the most part I don’t go to movies anymore if I’ve seen and loved the book.

The difference with my situation with All the King’s Men, was that I hadn’t really loved the book in the first place. Like I mentioned, I read it about four years ago and even discussed it extensively. I was surprised when we watched it how very little I remembered of the book. It’s not my memory failing either, I think it’s just that the book was not really my cup of tea.

L to R: Crawford as Stark, Huey Long

I’m not a huge fan of politics, for one. Don’t get me wrong, I vote and take it as a great responsibility for being an American. But I groan each time a presidential election comes around because of all the hype and propaganda, and the grand speeches and the piecrust promises. The mudslinging and backstabbing are hideous to watch and make me so weary. Therefore, when you present me with a story about the corruption and greed that comes from high positions of power, well, I’m not all that interested.

Willie Stark is the central figure in this story. Coming from a poor, uneducated background, we first meet him running for local office in the small fictional town of Kanoma. The state is never mentioned, but we know it’s in the Deep South. Willie is closely based on the very real governor of Louisiana, Huey Long, who was assassinated in 1935 as he was gearing up the political machine to make a bid for President of the United States.

When we first meet Willie (played by Broderick Crawford), he was labeled an honest man with courage, who was running for Kanoma County Treasurer. From there he is asked to run for governor of the state in a hope he’d split the “hick vote.” He does, but not before he finds his voice and starts giving impassioned (and liquor-fueled) speeches about bringing the truth to the “dumb hicks,” of which he proclaims to be. He finally wins on his third bid and his own descent into corruption is fast and quick. He does do many great things for his state – he builds roads, schools, and hospitals, he brings his state out of the horse-and-buggy era and into the twentieth century. But the means by which he accomplishes these ends is just as despicable as the men he was originally fighting in Kanoma County.

Anne and Jack before Willie comes between them.

In addition to this main thrust of the narrative is the secondary story of newspaper man Jack Burden, who originally covers Willie’s early runs for office. Jack, in contrast to Willie, was raised in an affluent, country-club atmosphere complete with a dickwad stepfather and a drunk mother. He is in love with Anne Stanton, a neighbor who was the daughter of a former governor and the sister to Adam, a doctor Willie later appoints to head the free-care hospital he is building in the capital. It is this trio of characters that make up the complexity of the picture and the novel. All three are taken in by Willie to some degree, and it ends up his undoing in the end.

All right, I’ve told you about the movie. What did I think of it? In truth, I didn’t like it, but that has to do a lot with my own personal likes and dislikes. This is not a movie that I would gladly skip to the movie theater to see. The story is compelling, to be sure, but in the end, I could tell you I’ve seen it too many times in real life to want to waste my time watching a movie about it.

In all, I think the adaptation of the movie from the book was actually pretty well done. I can only imagine how hard it must be to take a book as complex as this one and translate that into a film. There were a few things lost, most importantly I think, was Willie’s gradual decline into corruption. The book portrays it as a more subtle progression. In order to keep the time short in the movie, he seems to go from honest man to fat cat swindler almost overnight. And the catalyst that gets him there? Why booze, naturally. Interesting comment by the director, Robert Rossen, who also wrote the screenplay.

There is part of me (on a strictly academic level) that wants to watch the 2006 version starring Sean Penn to see another interpretation. But it’s a very small part, and I’m sure if I lie down a while it will pass.

Poor bastard.

My final feelings come down to this: indifference. It wasn’t great, it wasn’t horrible. But I do remember getting to the end of the movie, and almost simultaneously Kosta and I asked, “Would someone shoot this guy already?”

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall;

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the King’s horses, and all the King’s men,

Could not put Humpty Dumpty together again.”

When you look at the entire nursery rhyme from which the title of this movie (and book) is taken, it illustrates the story very well. What is also interesting is that Humpty Dumpty while never described in the poem itself, is always depicted as a large egg man—fragile, weak, and easily crushed. And while Willie Stark seemed the opposite of these things, ultimately he came to the same end as the egg man of the nursery rhyme.

~Anna

“Starkness”

I have always harbored reservations about watching this film even though I had never seen it before. In my mind I was concerned with the unappealing combination of it being shot in grainy black and white, having politics as a subject matter, and exhibiting a cast that wouldn’t exactly pack them into the cinemas on a Saturday night in 1949.

Team Willie

That writer-director, Robert Rossen was going for a gritty and (excuse the pun) stark look there can be no doubt, however, after viewing it, all that grittiness tends to leave a rather abrasive memory of the film on a whole. It certainly wasn’t a pretty picture to watch, and maybe Rossen shot it that way, but in doing so, it left a distinct and unattractive impression on me. Although being filmed in the late Forties, the look and feel of the film seemed more in tune with the Dust Bowl Thirties. Rossen reportedly used local people for his crowd scenes – a lot of them shot outside Hollywood – which contributed to the hard look of the film. Even during the supposed idyllic interludes when reporter-narrator Jack Burden returns to Burden’s Landing, the place he grew up in as a child, one can hardly get excited about the weedy-lined, sluggish river over which his car is ferried. I guess that since the story took place in a southern state (Louisiana being the unnamed place) and amongst the poor farmers who ended up being the core constituency for populist leader Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford), one cannot expect to see starched shirts, smart fedoras and evening gowns.

It's hard to be humble when you have a giant head.

In keeping with the raw visual nature of the film, the characters were pretty much a despicable bunch. I don’t think I can ever recall watching a film without at least one redeeming character. This film had none. In fact there didn’t seem to be a gentle soul amongst the lot of them. Willie Stark (based on the controversial governor, Huey “The Kingfish” Long) started his political career fighting corruption in the backwater towns of the state until he ended up being the biggest proponent of it in the governor’s mansion. Along for the ride was a cast of characters who sacrificed honor and decency for the chance to climb to the top with him. I’m guessing Robert Penn Warren who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel upon which the film was loosely based was not a big fan of crooked politicos. He certainly didn’t see much to admire in their machinery. Stark surrounds himself with a collection of thoroughly scheming and devious people including Sadie Burke (Mercedes McCambridge) and the bought-off newspaper man, Jack Burden (John Ireland). Burke, who at first is brought in to masquerade as one of Stark’s political handlers, actually U-turns and ends up becoming his top campaign aide. McCambridge garnered a Supporting Academy Award for her portrayal which is an interesting fact considering the positively nasty and brutish role she had to play. Jack, who sold his soul early in the film, ends up eliciting very little empathy even though he clearly has several clashes of conscience as the story unfolds.

Mercedes McCambridge plays the flinty Sadie Burke.

 In this film, the viewer is left waiting for someone – anyone – to step forward and do something honorable. But it never occurs. Characters who we think might end up doing the right thing invariably take the low road and end up in a state of misery or worse, dead. Consider Judge Monte Stanton, a character who seems immune from Willie Stark’s rapacious and corruptible grasp. He ends up shooting himself when through Jack’s investigations; an unsavory incident from his past is uncovered. The fact that Jack had once loved and admired the Judge makes this scene that much harder to watch. It seems as if the corrosiveness of Willie Stark permeates everyone and everything in which it comes into contact. Anne and Adam Stanton, the brother and sister team who begin the movie with such promise also fall under and get crushed beneath the Stark political machine. In fact, after it is revealed that Anne sleeps with Stark, all our hopes lay with Adam, the one last redeemable character in the film who fights Stark ’til the end when unable to defeat him, he actually assassinates him and is in turn gunned down by Stark’s bodyguard, Sugar Boy. Watch, by the way, how many shots Sugar Boy pumps into Adams’ prone body. It was reported that Carl Weiss, the physician who assassinated Huey Long was summarily gunned down an instant later by Long’s cadre of bodyguards, who shot him 62 times!

In its overall look and feel, would have to admit that All the King’s Men has to be the starkest film ever to receive the Academy Award.

Clockwise from top left: misshapen snoot, nose full of nickels,
luxuriant trunk, and hatchet.

Finally, if the reader would indulge my irreverence for a moment I would be remiss if I did not mention a small detail I found rather amusing in this otherwise totally humorless film. All the King’s Men has to have been the only movie in cinema history to display as grandiose a collection of proboscises as has ever been committed to celluloid. Consider Broderick Crawford’s broken and misshapen snoot. Then we move on to John Ireland’s “nose full of nickels”. And how about actress Anne Seymour’s luxuriant trunk? Toss in character actor Walter Burke’s noteworthy conk and Mercedes McCambridge’s hatchet and you have a pretty amazing assortment of smellers. One is just thankful that Karl Mauldin and Barbara Streisand were not included in the cast…!

--kak

Up next: An American in Paris (1951)