In mid-December --- at the height of the Serious Movie Season and in plenty of time for Oscar consideration --- the new version of 'All the King's Men' will show up at your multiplex. It stars Sean Penn as Willie Stark, the crude backcountry politician who starts off a hero and ends up a demagogue, Jude Law as the idealistic reporter who becomes Willie's apologist, and Kate Winslet, James Gandolfini, Patricia Clarkson, Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Hopkins. That's a lot of star power.
The film presumably asks the same two questions posed by the 1949 movie --- which won Oscars for its director, Robert Rossen, and its stars, Broderick Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge --- and the 1946 novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Robert Penn Warren and is generally considered the greatest of all American political novels.
One question is a simple one: Can an honest politician stay honest and succeed?
The other is more complex: Can good come from evil? Put another way, can a politician who wants to help his people do corrupt things to gain and maintain power without corrupting himself and tainting whatever he does manage to accomplish?
These are heady questions. They are also, if you have looked at a newspaper recently, timely questions. They were timely questions in l943 as well, when Robert Penn Warren started his 700-page meditation on Huey Long, the governor of Louisiana who inspired both admiration and revulsion. It may well be that they have been timely questions in every age --- that these are the questions that reveal the gap between our public ideals and vile behavior.
Lord knows, Willie started out honest. Indeed, it's his political opponents who are crooked; they have run this tiny Southern county for years and see no reason why the arrangement shouldn't be permanent. Willie has other ideas. Better, finer ideas. Useless ideas --- in the election, Willie is soundly defeated. But he isn't wrong. His opponents are crooks. And when a school stairway collapses due to shoddy workmanship and children die, Willie's career is revived.
Willie is too dumb to notice that his real backers are his old opponents; he's been set-up, he's supposed to lose this governor's race. When he finds out, he's furious. He exposes the set-up, calls the voters 'hicks' and says he too is a hick. These incendiary speeches have an effect --- the voters fall in love with Willie.
By the time Willie makes a successful run for governor, he's no longer the backcountry lawyer with simple intentions. Now he's made deals, often with his adversaries. Not that it matters, he insists --- he'll take money from the devil if he can build a hospital. And does it matter that he now drinks all day? And is no longer faithful to his wife or much of a father to his son?
And then, as you may suspect, it all starts falling apart for Willie.
The novel is beautifully written. It has great, brawling scenes; it also meanders like a Southern stream and explores quiet eddies along the way. Not so the Robert Rossen movie --- it's a freight train powered by Broderick Crawford's rough, raspy sprint of a performance. Crawford plays Willie like an animal; he's all mouth and muscle. It's a brilliant and terrifying tour de force.
If you don't have time for the pleasures the book provides, a couple of hours with Broderick Crawford will give you a portrait of a politician so in love with his own good intentions he doesn't even care when he breaks the law. Sean Penn, one of our finest actors, will have to deliver a world-class performance even to come close.
--- Jesse Kornbluth, for HeadButler.com
To buy the novel of 'All the King's Men' from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy the DVD of the film of 'All the King's Men' from Amazon.com, click here.
