All the King's Men

This 1949 movie based on the Pulitzer Prize winning book of the same name mirrored that success with an Oscar for Best Picture.

Very few, if any, Pulitzer Prize winning books have become best picture winners in the film version so this should stand very well that the movie is a winning effort.

For me however this is just not the case. The movie to me started very strongly and I was very interested in the character Willie Stark as he suffered indignities as he strove to improve himself. The movie however did not improve from there. Clearly the movie follows the book and the book is a thinly veiled representation of the real life demagogue Huey Long of Louisiana but it seems to me that the movie made everything just a little too simple.

Perhaps having a short time frame to tell a movie in just does not compare to the nuanced views we can see today in shows such as Boardwalk Empire and earlier The Soprano's. Good men with evil in them or evil men with good in them. The transformation of Willie Stark however does not brim over with complexity.

Started in politics as a " dummy", that is a hick to split the vote that would have otherwise have gone to a feared challenger so that the establishment candidate can win Willie learns of the plot and rebels. He becomes a populist demagogue calling his target audience that they are hicks and only a hick, like he Willie Stark, can help a hick.

Once in office Stark has very redeemable goals. Free health care, accessible free education, good roads for farmers to get their product to market, all of these and more are certainly commendable. To make these things happen however Willie will make deals which are not clean. Moreover for Willie politics becomes blood sport, those that get in his way are removed one way or the other. Eventually as one might expect Willie's downfall comes. Leaving one to wonder what might have been had he lived, and if it is possible for anyone to have clean goals and accomplish them in clean ways.

Broderick Crawford won an Oscar for his performance and deservedly so. With his large forehead free of hair with his hairstyle I chuckled to myself waiting for him to do a Jackie Gleason impression but of course this movie was well before " The Great One's " debut.

This movie was solid but I must admit it is nothing close to an Oscar Winner and when one realizes that just a couple of years later Hitchcock was making his stunning run of movies in the early fifties one sees how this movie came at the tail end of a production era that was just abut done. This in itself might well be why this movie seems so dated but for whatever reason this movie can be deemed nothing more than a disappointment.