All the King's Men

I’d been meaning for some time to watch this and Face in the Crowd again, for their relevance to contemporary American politics, but this got bumped forward because I am contemplating a film series on “Remembering New Orleans.” In actuality, the particularities of Huey Long and Louisiana are quite submerged in the film, in the interests of the broader political fable, of demagoguery and the corruption of power. Hmm, still relevant -- and the film holds up pretty well, probably earned its Oscar for Best Picture, as Broderick Crawford did for Best Actor and Mercedes McCambridge for Best Supporting Actress. It may just be a Classics Illustrated version of Robert Penn Warren, with Robert Rossen’s densely-packed frames replacing the novel’s depth of insight, but a good one nonetheless. For example, he can only include half of what to me is one of the most memorable lines in American fiction, when Willie Stark instructs Jack Burden to dig up the dirt on Judge Stanton, “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption. He passeth from the stink of the didey to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.” As it happens, Steve Zallian (Searching for Bobby Fischer) is now in post-production with a remake starring Sean Penn -- should be interesting. (1949, dvd, r.) *8-*

Another New Orleans film I just caught up with, Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), is a real car wreck of a movie -- a pile-up involving Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and Montgomery Clift; Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and Joseph Mankiewicz; incest and homosexuality, madness and murder, demons and blasphemy. You can’t watch, but you can’t look away either.