Evan D. As a project this year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Anora. All the King’s Men is the twenty second film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here. When journalist Jack Burden (John Ireland) is sent on assignment to cover a candidate for county treasurer in a rural town of his unnamed state, he is understandably baffled. After all, what interest is a long shot rabble rouser in a local election to the newspaper’s readership? The cynicism of his editor’s wry answer reverberates through the totality of Robert Rossen’s All the King’s Men: “People say he’s an honest guy.”
Adapted from a novel of the same name — itself loosely based on the life of Louisiana governor Huey Long — Rossen’s film charts the rise and ultimate demise of fictional southern governor Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford.) When we meet Willie he’s on the street corner passionately excoriating the local politicians for their blatant and dangerous corruption. One particular claim he levies is that the town leadership funneled the contract for building a schoolhouse to a brick laying company owned by their friend. Quickly the counsel members shut down Willie’s protest and have him detained by police. Then the schoolhouse collapses and everything changes. No longer the wide-eyed firebrand, Willie Stark is now seen as a crusader speaking truth to power. Quickly he is drafted to run for Governor. Unbeknownst to Stark, his campaign is being run by the incumbent Governor who sought to use Stark’s credibility with rural constituents to split votes with his opponent and seal a second term. When this deception is revealed and Stark feels the teeth of organized power clamp down on him again, something snaps. He ditches the prepared speeches and adopts the impassioned rhetoric of a populist. While he falls short of the governor’s mansion, he prophetically claims that he has “learned how to win.” Four years pass and Willie Stark sweeps into the governorship. But this is not the same Willie that Jack Burden met so many years ago. Stark has built an entire political apparatus. He has under the table arrangements with all the monied powers in the state. He still advocates for building roads and schools, but each must bear his name and those who oppose his agenda feel the weight of the statehouse pressed upon them. In many ways the governor has become everything he used to rail against. There is a contrasting eternal and modern spirit to All the King’s Men that speaks to the timelessness of stories about political corruption. Although built as a — pointedly harsh at times — fictionalization of Huey Long, Willie Stark can easily be seen as a stand in for a great number of current world leaders who rode a wave of populism into power. The relevance is only aided by a committed performance from Crawford, who is able to authentically channel the currents of righteous fury and then bend them into a self-righteous corruption. For all of all the honesty inherent to the maxim “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” it is still difficult to escape the cynicism deeply embedded in the story. The earnest Willie Stark we are introduced to is an honest guy. He puts himself in the crosshairs of entrenched political power to advocate for children and against corruption. At first he is not even interested in running for governor! All the Kings Men suggests that even for the honest, politics corrupts. That to reach the highest levels of power within the government requires complete abandonment of a scruples and, worse, complete deterioration of the soul. Certainly there is a level of egocentrism that serves as table stakes to entering the political arena but the inevitability of Willie’s descent into Governor Stark feels dispiriting at times. The classic inverse formula of a propulsive rise to power and corresponding plummet of moral integrity is just as entertaining here as it is in any mafia film but it feels worse. Huey Long’s legacy is the brutal grip he held over Louisiana politics, but it is also the thousands of miles of roads he built in one of the country’s poorest states and his contribution to the most impactful parts of the Second New Deal. All the King’s Men mirrors those dictatorial leanings but paints Stark’s early idealism as merely opportunistic. Beyond cynical, its a choice that flattens the story’s main character. As a piece of entertainment, All the King’s Men is a fantastically paced and thrilling journey for Willie Stark and his band of merry enablers. What it has to say is as relevant as ever, even if that message is at times disheartening. A more nuanced look at its subject may have yielded a deeper look at the corrupting tendrils of power. Still, as long as there are new demagogues praying on populist whims of their constituents, Willie Stark will remains a familiar figure. The ambiguity of his ideals and clarity of his corruption will always be recognizable in the faces of our worst leaders. For that alone, All the King’s Men is successful. 8/10
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