All the King's Men

The 1949 Best Picture Oscar went to All the King's Men, written and directed by Robert Rossen and based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Robert Penn Warren. The book was a roman a clef about Louisiana governor Huey Long, (here called Willie Stark) who was a populist and a demagogue, and was assassinated before he could take his considerable ambitions national.

The film starred Broderick Crawford, heretofore a toiler in B-pictures, and he earned the Oscar for Best Actor (the part was initially refused, indignantly, by John Wayne, who called the script unpatriotic). Also winning an Oscar was Mercedes McCambridge as Best Supporting Actress as Stark's secretary. Her performance, while good, is something of a stereotype now--the career woman who is deep down lonely and bitter.

I found this picture to be trying. It creaks with melodrama, and the arc of Stark's rise and fall is predictable and familiar. The bends in the story are well telegraphed (when we learn that Stark's son is drinking too much, he gets his comeuppance only seconds later). What's missing is the man underneath the bluster and speechifying. In the beginning, Stark is seen as a hero, a man who will tell the truth and wants to do good (and inspires the narrator of the film, a reporter played by John Ireland). But once he is elected governor he becomes as corrupt as the machine he was fighting, and we never really know why. We know he grew up poor and uneducated, but we never get to see what truly makes him tick.

About nine years later a movie about the dangers of populist politics came along, A Face in the Crowd, starring Andy Griffith. This film was far better in its study of how power works and the masses are manipulated. That film received no consideration from Oscar.