Books |
All the King’s Men
Robert Penn Warren
By
Published: Oct 11, 2022
Category:
Fiction
This 1946 novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Robert Penn Warren, is generally considered the greatest of all American political novels. The 1949 film is just as great: It won three Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor (Broderick Crawford), and Best Supporting Actress (Mercedes McCambridge).
The novel asks two questions. Can an honest politician stay honest and succeed? Can good come from evil? Put another way, a politician wants to help his people. He does corrupt things to gain and maintain power and, he believes, fulfill his pledge to them. Can he do that without corrupting himself and tainting whatever he does manage to accomplish?
These are unfamiliar questions for us. We’re cynical. We’ve seen that politics is mostly about deals that reveal how almost everyone’s compromised. But these were timely questions in l943, when Robert Penn Warren started his meditation on Willie Stark, who was based on Huey Long, the governor of Louisiana who inspired both admiration and revulsion. The arc is classic tragedy, in much the same way that “Law and Order” is classic tragedy — at the end of the story, we’re far from where we started. Watch the trailer.
Willy is a man of the people. He calls the voters “hicks” and says he too is a hick. His incendiary speeches have an effect — the voters fall in love with Willie. Looking at the 1940s, you can see the 2220s. Watch.
By the time Willie makes a successful run for governor, he’s no longer the back country 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?Watch the change.
And then, as you may suspect, it all starts falling apart for Willie. Watch here and here.
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 terrifying tour de force. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle download, click here. To stream the movie from Amazon Prime, click here.]
Read the book? Watch the movie? May these be your toughest choices.
