ShareThisBy BRUCE DANCIS
The release this week on DVD of 1949's "All the King's Men" seems to have everything to do with promoting the new version of the movie, opening later this month, and nothing concerning the importance and significance of the original film.
This bare-bones DVD (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, $19.94, not rated) comes with not a single bonus feature about producer/director/writer Robert Rossen's movie. Instead, there's both a preview and a trailer for the new movie, written and directed by Steve Zaillian.
And while the new film may indeed be something great _ it certainly has a spectacular cast in Sean Penn, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, James Gandolfini, Anthony Hopkins, Patricia Clarkson and Mark Ruffalo _ it will have to be special indeed to match up with Rossen's version.
Based on Robert Penn Warren's Pulitizer Prize-winning novel, Rossen's "All the King's Men" won the Academy Award for best picture, while also scoring Oscars for Broderick Crawford's starring portrayal of politician Willie Stark and Mercedes McCambridge's supporting work as political aide Sadie Burke. Rossen received Oscar nominations for his direction and screenplay, and costar John Ireland was nominated for his supporting performance as journalist-turned-political operative Jack Burden.
Warren's novel and Rossen's film are based on the real-life rise-and-fall of Louisiana's Huey P. Long, who emerged from a dirt-poor farm family and through a populist appeal was elected governor and then U.S. Senator _ actually holding both offices simultaneously for two years in the early 1930s. Once in power, Long delivered on many of his promises, building roads, schools, hospitals and other needed public works in one of the nation's poorest states. But he also built up a corrupt political machine, organized what was essentially his own private army of state troopers and made deals and took graft from many of the corporations he was railing against for political gain.
With the political slogan of "Every man a king, but no one wears a crown," Long began to push his policies nationwide, becoming a rival to Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt from the left. He criticized FDR's New Deal policies as being inadequate to solving the problems of the Great Depression and promoted a program to tax the rich and redistribute the wealth to every American family.
But Long's presidential aspirations in the 1936 election, and his life, were ended by an assassin's bullet in Baton Rouge in September 1935.
Rossen's film is built around the perennial political question, Do the ends justify the means?, as it is played out on both a political and a personal basis.
The conscience of the film is represented by John Ireland's Jack Burden, whose background is among the state's elite. A renegade from his class, he abhors both the inaction of decent people he admires and the reactionary views of others, particular his stepfather.
As a newspaper reporter who writes the first sympathetic stories about Stark for a statewide audience and then becomes one of Stark's advisers and researchers, Burden recognizes all the good Stark can do, and does do. He even states the old adage, "You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs," while at the same time being unable to overlook the corruption, both personal and political, that swirls all around Stark.
There's a hint of radicalism in Stark's slogan "Soak the Fat Boys" (a play on the more familiar Depression-era "Soak the Rich"), but such themes aren't developed beyond a generalized populism.
Still, "All the King's Men" is the rare American movie that even attempts to tackle such significant political issues as wealth and poverty, political corruption and ends versus means, and to offer an intelligent debate on them.
It's a movie that should have received the kind of DVD treatment it deserved, with retrospective interviews, audio commentaries by film historians and critics _ something more than just being a promo for a new version of the movie.
All the King's Men (1949)
4 stars (movie)
Bonus features: none
Cast: Broderick Crawford, John Ireland, Joanne Dru, John Derek, Mercedes McCambridge, Shepperd Strudwick, Ralph Dumke and Anne Seymour.
Director/producer/writer: Robert Rossen (based on the novel by Robert Penn Warren)
Distributor: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Not rated
(Bruce Dancis can be reached at bdancis(at)sacbee.com.)
