Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 10-April-11
Spoiler Rating: Medium

All the King's Men (1949)

Until this week I assiduously avoided the movie version of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. This is because I have loved and revered the book for many years. Few literary works slay me like this great American novel, part grand Southern melodrama, part personal journey, and part political exposé. And the prose! One needn't read anything else Warren wrote to understand why he was a U.S. poet laureate; his voice is intoxicating and his words ambrosial. Such work couldn't be translated to film.

My reluctance to watch the doomed adaptation was overcome when I embarked on this month's series about Pulitzer Prize-winners that have become movies.* Happily, All the King's Men is a solid adaptation. It omits what can't be translated from the book while conveying the meat of the story. Here is conflicted narrator Jack Burden (John Ireland), backwater politician Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford), and the swirl of practical and moral conundrums that engulfs them. Jack, a lost soul of sorts, meets Willie while working as a reporter. At the time Willie is a self-proclaimed hick who wants to represent hicks but is failing because he's over-earnest and doesn't know how to play the game. He has an epiphany while suffering an unprecedented hangover during a campaign in which he's being used to split votes. As Jack and a hard-bitten political hack named Sadie (Mercedes McCambridge) watch in amazement, Willie the clueless yokel transforms into Willie the tough-talking fighter, and the people fall in love with him. Electrifying in both book and movie, this scene alone might explain why Crawford won an Oscar (as did McCambridge and the picture as a whole).

Jack leaves the paper and goes to work for Willie after he's elected governor, but his foray into the halls of power proves to be one of his burdens. He cannot reconcile the sanctity of his childhood home and the people who inhabit it with his new life as the governor's errand boy. Jack grew up with his closest friends Adam Stanton (Shepperd Strudwick), now a successful surgeon, and Anne Stanton (Joanne Dru), whom Jack has long hoped to marry. The Stantons' father was a governor and their uncle is a respected jurist. These people believe in progress through integrity, something which has no place in Willie Stark's regime. For Willie, drunk with power, popularity, and a constant supply of liquor, has learned that the fastest way to get things done is through threats and bribes, and possibly even murder. He hasn't forgotten the hicks he swore to serve, but he acts as a hammer to force their (his) will throughout the state.

Jack's worlds collide within his conscience and then in plain sight as Willie insinuates himself into the lives of everyone he holds dear. The movie depicts this conflict well, although one might wish that Dru were more natural an actress. Like the heat that marks their Southern summers, the pressure mounts until it becomes too much for the characters to bear. The conclusion to All the King's Men is both tragic and satisfying in its inevitability. The degree of satisfaction produced by the movie is notable if not equal to the deep-seated fulfillment of the novel.

*See the Index by date for a list of other films in this month's series.

Copyright © 2011 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.