All the King's Men (Robert Rossen, 1949)

Based on Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, All the King's Men (Robert Rossen, 1949) won the Best Picture Oscar at the 22nd Academy Awards. A barely veiled account of Huey Long's rise to demagoguery, it inches above typical middlebrow fare mostly via the hothouse, Oscar-winning performances of Broderick Crawford as the Long figure Willie Stark and the sui generis Mercedes McCambridge in her first film role! John Ireland adds some of the heat he'd later apply up against a different Crawford (Joan!) in Queen Bee. And a twenty-two-year-old John Derek is around lookin' all pretty as Stark's football player son. But as usual, if I'm praising the acting, then you know something's wrong. Like countless such topical films, All the King's Men makes you wonder why it had to be a *film* and not an informative long read. Solid, welcome, even enjoyable, but I'll forget it by December just like I did that Boston investigative journalism Best Picture winner from a few years back. Grade: B+, the dispassionate fate of so much Oscar fare. P. S. Never saw the 2006 remake which looks awful.