All the King's Men Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		4.0

All the King's Men Blu-ray Movie Review

The Stark truth.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 25, 2014

There’s a regular right wing talking point that likes to emphasize what is perceived as President Obama’s efforts to “redistribute the wealth”. Whether or not that effort is fact based or not is of course open to debate, but it would be interesting to see how many of these same pundits would have responded to Huey Long during his heyday (it should be stated for some readers that this is not the same Huey Long of Ink Spots pop music fame). Though Long is not that well remembered nowadays, with a reputation that is largely confined to political junkies (not to mention certain film aficionados who love All The King’s Men), in the late twenties and early thirties he was one of the most famous— or perhaps infamous—politicians in the United States. Long rose to national fame as the Governor of Louisiana from 1928-1932, but after he was elected to the United States Senate in 1932 he became even more of a flashpoint when he promulgated a “Share the Wealth” program which probably would have caused several of the usual right leaning suspects’ heads to explode. Long didn’t just dance around ideas of “redistribution”, he met them head on, arguing that the Depression had been caused by what is commonly referred to nowadays as income inequality. Long proposed actually limiting personal wealth through an arcane formula which to those opposed smacked of anti-Capitalism if not outright Communism. Long, who had at one point been a staunch ally of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, decided to take on his former mentor in the upcoming 1936 presidential contest, but fate intervened when Long was assassinated in 1935, not as a direct result of his wealth distribution schemes, but for a more mundane attempt to remove a Judge whom Long hated from the bench, an attempt which was not greeted well by the Judge’s son-in-law. (Though not exactly analogous, Roosevelt himself ironically ran into some judicial trouble of his own which nearly derailed his Presidency a year or so later when he attempted to “pack” the Supreme Court with appointees more in line with his way of thinking.) Long’s legacy is still hotly debated in political circles, with some claiming he was a hero to the working class and a prescient prophet of a growing class struggle in the United States, while deriders allege he was little more than a garden variety demagogue. Author Robert Penn Warren never denied that Huey Long provided some grist for the mill of creating the iconic character of Willie Stark, an initially idealistic southern man who rises to the pinnacle of power only to see it all slip through his fingers like so much sand, a victim of his own hubris and the corruptive influence of that selfsame power. But Warren also cautioned about equating Stark with Long, even though some have pointed out that the title of Warren’s novel, All the King’s Men, could be seen as a direct reference to Long’s own slogan “Every man a king”. The only true king in both the novel and the Academy Award winning 1949 film adaptation is of course Willie Stark himself, though his tenure on his self made throne is short lived and tumultuous.

Jack Burden (John Ireland, Academy Award nominated) is a beat reporter who’s looking forward to some time off with this girlfriend when his assignment editor tells him he needs to forego any time off to look into a candidate who’s raising quite a ruckus in a southern town called Konoma in an unidentified state. It’s notable that the assignment editor isn’t even sure what office the politician is running for, feeling that the story is important because the subject is evidently that rarest of breeds, the honest politician. Once Jack arrives, he finds out that the politician, one Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford), may not exactly be chasing after the most prestigious job in the world (county treasurer, in fact), but he’s highly motivated and he has the kind of enthusiasm that rankles the town establishment.

Jack himself is swept along by Willie’s inexorable charisma, and becomes something of a cheerleader instead of a purely objective reporter. Willie seems to be a great if not exactly perfect Everyman, a blue collar stiff who’s out to rid his neck of the woods of the corruption which runs completely rampant through most of the elected officials. All the King’s Men charts Willie’s rise through the ranks, with Jack acting as a kind of Greek Chorus, albeit a participatory one. Despite being a product of the 1940s, All the King’s Men is almost shockingly prescient in its depiction of the accretion of power and its corrupting influence, as well as making some salient points about a representative of the press who checks his objectivity at the door, at least for a little while.

Willie makes professional headway with a law degree and ultimately gains the state’s governorship, ascents which director Robert Rossen repeatedly frames in montage sequences. In a bit of perhaps too convenient plotting, Jack’s girlfriend Anne (Joanne Dru) turns out to be the niece of a prominent Judge (Raymond Greenleaf) who comes to play an important part in Willie’s ultimate downfall. There’s a fair degree of soap operatic content with regard to Jack and Anne, as well as a dutiful assistant to Willie named Sadie Burke (Mercedes McCambridge, Academy Award winner for this role) whose feelings for Willie remain largely unrequited. There’s also a subplot involving Willie’s son Tom (a very young—and brown haired—John Derek), who has a moment of indiscretion that ends up having major consequences for his father.

All The King’s Men is an actors’ showcase, and from Broderick Crawford on down, the film offers a beautifully naturalistic performance milieu, one that brilliantly captures a grassroots political organization hitting the big time. Crawford, certainly one of the more unlikely leading men in Hollywood history (at least during this still more glamorous era), is blisteringly effective as Willie, finely delineating the character’s increasing moral turpitude which is nonetheless anchored in a sincere desire to help the common man. It’s interesting to note that Robert Rossen, an initially unrepentant Communist Party member (he, like Elia Kazan, finally did name names when pushed during the early fifties HUAC hearings), doesn’t paper over the dangers of an incipient populism in the film, and in fact quite pointedly focuses on the perils of electing a leader who promises a figurative chicken in every pot (and then some) for the working class.

All the King's Men Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

All the King's Men is presented on Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.34:1. This is another fantastic looking high definition presentation from the Columbia archives, one which offers resolute contrast, deep, pleasing blacks and extremely well modulated gray scale. The elements utilized are largely pristine, and there's really no damage of any major import to mention. Grain structure is natural looking, though at times just slightly variable, as is sharpness (it's important to keep in mind that there's a glut of multi-pass opticals in this piece, which will naturally tweak the appearance of grain and sharpness). Also, on just a few occasions there are some minor density variances that show up for just an instant or two, creating slight, almost imperceptible, flickering.

All the King's Men Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

All the King's Men's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono track quite capably reproduces the film's largely dialogue driven sound mix. Louis Gruenberg's brass inflected score also sounds fine, if occasionally just slightly boxy. Fidelity is just fine with no damage to report.

All the King's Men Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Isolated Score Track is presented via DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0.


• Original Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 2:37) would appear to not exactly be the original trailer since it trumpets the film's Academy Award wins.

All the King's Men Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Willie Stark remains one of the most iconic characters in the annals of American political fiction, and he's brought vividly to life by Broderick Crawford in a performance that still rings true and has impeccable power and, ultimately, disturbing tragedy. Some of the secondary plot points are a bit hackneyed, but overall this film is amazingly contemporary feeling, filled with an expert supporting cast, and bolstered by sure direction by Rossen and some interesting editing choices by Robert Parrish. This Blu- ray doesn't have much to offer in the supplements department (Gruenberg's music is fine, mind you, but not especially brilliant), but the video and audio are top notch. Highly recommended.