Robert Rossen's Oscar BEST PICTURE victor is a prestige production right out of the box, on the strength of its eponymous Pulitzer's winning source novel from Robert Penn Warren, which is a piercingly acute and tub-thumping reconstruction of the rise and the sudden cessation of an American hick politician encroached by power and corruption, loosely based on the real life figure Huey Long (1893-1935), the former Louisiana senator and governor, who was assassinated on his heyday.
In this film, the politician is Willie Stark (Crawford), and John Ireland plays Jack Burden, a journalist who becomes one of Willie's closest cronies and his PR man, and almost exclusively, the story enfolds from John's standpoint, a prodigal son of a well-off family who cannot stand his uppity stepfather (Rhodes), he aspires to make good so that he can marry his sweetheart Anne Stanton (Dru). After a congenial start with Willie and impressed by his mettle, ardor and populist ideal, Jack is fingered for Willie's righthand man during the latter's second governor campaign.
Seen on the sidelines, Jack's moral compass starts to veer when Willie comes off to be exactly the same shady politician he claims to fight against in the first place. But what is more complicating is after sussing out what kind of a person Willie has become, Jack doesn't leave, he condones the ugly side of Willie's political game, while is burdened with a hard-pressed complicity, however, the film doesn't care to spell out his motives (he even swallows his pride after Anne gets infatuated with Willie and becomes a home-wrecker), all seems to simply put him there to be the eye witness of the final poetic justice.
For my two cents' worth, Crawford attains his Oscar statuette by the sheer volume of his vociferousness, a barnstorming force that is all mighty and impressive at first glance, but teeters onto a one-trick pony after being multiply edited and superimposed on the screen . By and large it is just too incredible that Willie could muster such a magnitude of followers-who is treated with hallowed close-ups of their God-fearing piety in the climatic ferment-after all the evil deeds we have seen that Willie is capable of doing without any modicum of relentlessness, and not much of the counterexample is presented to offset the bitter taste. Although the film still retains its pertinent insight about and its demythologizing resolution to probe into the muddy waters of democratic politicking.
While politics is predominantly a boy's game at then, ALL THE KING'S MEN's female characters are much more complex than arm-candies or guileless wives, Mercedes McCambridge's Sadie Burke is as ambitious and ruthless as her employee Willie, hampered only by her sex persuasion, she can roar like a lioness, shoot venom and barbs at will, not feign a teardrop after receiving a fat slap,and winning an Oscar for her silver screen debut, what a manna from heaven a gal can ever dream of. Joanne Dru, on the other hand, is less fortunate being saddled with a half-baked character, as her Anne is implicated by some real faulty, fatuous decisions which the movie equivocates about, mainly a plot device, albeit Dru clearly has more to offer.
Rapier-like in its censuring attitude, whirlpool-like in its executive fashion, Rossen's ALL THE KING'S MEN is a major film kit out to dazzle and stun its oblivious audience with its assault on our sensoria, to point up Hollywood's liberal-minded gesture to welcome something none too patriotic into the fray, one might quibble its cynical footing and minor arrangement in the screenwriting process, but nonetheless, it is a helluva experience to fine-tune our understanding of certain rotten business.
referential entries: Rossen's THE HUSTLER (1961, 7.7/10); Steven Zaillian's ALL THE KING'S MEN (2006, 6.6/10).
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