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.

Smokey and the Bandit

For all my affectations of trying to read many of the classic novels, historical and biographical books, enjoying a wide range of all music and of course classic movies I was raised a country kid.

I grew up in a small town, we went to the car races all summer long, and when I was a 12 year old boy and went with a friends family to the drive in ( another thing long gone from the landscape) to see this movie it was a highlight.

I loved this movie. As a twelve year old it had a cool star, fast cars, a Trans Am no less and enough cursing to be be considered cool. Later we would watch Porky's and feel the same but for now the Trans Am was a huge star, one that young boys would fall in love with.

Now I should admit that I also in this time frame or soon thereafter found The Dukes of Hazzard to be a great show too. That show too featured cars and racing as well as those Daisy Dukes.

With the Dukes still on CMT I got a chance to watch this the other day. It does not age well. I do not feel any affection for it. It is awful to watch.

However catching Smokey and the Bandit on cable a week or so ago I have to admit a stunning fact. I love this movie. It is a good story. It is not illuminating in any way. It does not teach or moralize. But it is funny.

Perhaps the best thing about the movie is Jackie Gleason. He was an underrated actor and in this role as Sheriff Buford T Pusser he lays it on thick. It works. Burt Reynolds underrated in many of his roles plays his part well and certainly not in an understated way. Sally Fields and Jerry Lee Lewis were also good.

Some movies just work. This movie is a snapshot of redneck culture in the mid seventies. Good, bad or indifferent it works. It still does.