All the King's Men 4K 1949

When I read Robert Penn Warren's novel, I was immediately interested - how was this beautiful, but clearly not suitable for the screen? It would seem that from the version, filmed almost immediately after the book's release and awarded an Oscar, one could still expect something good....

It was clear from the very beginning that to keep in full the plot of the thick novel on the screen will not be possible, but Robert Rossen chose the worst way to reduce it. First of all, he cut the chronology: in front of our eyes we simultaneously see Burden meeting Stark, protesting against the construction of a school made of low-quality bricks, falling in love with Anna (when he already has a profession as a reporter and she is no longer a schoolgirl, which destroys the central conflict of this part of the plot), and yet Stark is only still in law school. Not to mention completely inexplicable changes like Tom being an adopted son (or rather, their reasons are understandable, a tighter chronology would have forced Stark to be older initially, so that at the end his own son is drunk in college). Next, Stark quickly becomes governor (it is assumed that Anna and Jack's relationship went somewhere in this interval, but it is absolutely unclear where and why) and indulges in corruption and revels in power, but at the same time the judge likes him very much at first, and Anna immediately and obviously falls in love with him. At the same time Stark is much more vicious than in the book - his amusements with dancers take place not in private but in front of newspaper cameras, he not only blackmails people, but also disperses opponents by police forces and even kills dissatisfied people.

That's the main problem with the movie. The book was about how a strong leader came to power in a democratic regime and what came out of it, because that's how democracy actually works. The movie is about how a tyrant-demagogue without any ideals came to power completely undemocratically (how he almost instantly hatched out of the kind, sincere and naive Willie of the first scenes, again, from the movie is not clear). The novel was characterized by a somewhat cynical, but truthful and keen eye, and its characters were all complex, especially for moral evaluation, people. Robert Rossen, on the other hand, does not spare black and white colors. All the villainy needed in the plot is directly assigned to Stark, all his worthy impulses are unambiguously treated as populism, and his opponents, on the contrary, are left without the slightest stain on their reputations.

The need to instantly reveal the characters and conflicts that have been developing in the novel for dozens of pages leads to the appearance of unnatural mise-en-scene and unnatural lines designed to show everything more clearly. Even quotations from the book look ridiculous here, because they are placed in a different context, and most of them are rather devoid of context. As I said, Stark's moral transformation is not explained in any way and looks like some kind of magic. Jack Burden is even worse - by merging his chronological development from idealist to cynic and back again in one moment, his image is destroyed altogether, as he behaves like one or the other for one minute. Anna Stanton looks like a not-so-intelligent love-struck hysteric here. From Adam did not manage to leave even his coldness.

Accordingly. to say anything about the acting is difficult. Mercedes McCambridge, at least, shows strong passions; Broderick Crawford is good charismatically shouting from the stands, good ominously squinting, good plainly sitting at the village table. Unfortunately, they don't have characters to play, characters, not sets of stilted lines. So it's hard to appreciate their acting, just as it's hard to recognize the skill of a mason from the remains of a house built on sand. Maybe the way they wriggled out of the script is worthy of the Oscars.

I don't know where the Oscar jury looked, but 'All the King's Men' is a bad movie. Not just a bad adaptation, but a movie not worth the film it was shot on in every way.