All the King's Men (1948)

All the King's Men (Robert Rossen, 1948) The Oscar-winner for Best Picture of 1949 and it's hard to argue. Rossen's adaptation of Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the corrupting powers of politics, it boasts two powerful (and Oscar-winning) performances: Broderick Crawford as innocent-turned-player Willie Stark (an amalgam of several politicians—as the corruption of power is a fairly universal theme in both the arts and reality—but mostly resembling Huey Long) and Mercedes McCambridge as his cynical-to-the-marrow political assistant.  

McCambridge is so good and so inventive that she might just as well have been given the statue for the next five years. Would that the other performances have been as electric as these two, but one could say that they shine even more brightly next to the lesser lights. 

It's particularly interesting to see Crawford so restrained at the beginning of the film, but once he sees how the game is played he turns on the after-burners and soars over everybody else in the frame with him. Mention should be made of the occasional glimpses of a documentary style in the rally scenes amid the more traditionally blocked studio framing. 

And an interesting stylistic note: the film may seem a bit abrupt in places--but that's because Rossen, determined to get the film below two hours, gave his editor instructions to take most of the scenes and cut precisely thirty seconds from the front of them and thirty seconds from the back (making sure not to clip off any dialogue). What was left was the hard nugget of the scene's core and All the King's Men feels more brutal in its pace and attitude because of this uncompromising strategy. It is a must-see film that shows the dichotomy of the American political system—of appealing to the little guy while also seeking power enough to be able to stand on their necks.

The film was re-made in 2006, with a mind to including the parts that couldn't be utilized in Warren's novel in the more repressed times when the original was made, but ended up looking bloated and shrill. The more soapish aspects of the novel were eliminated from the adaptation of the first film and it has the unanticipated benefit of focusing the film on its larger theme of political corruption and less on human corruption, and, as a result, gives the film a harder, more dangerous edge. Rossen's work is so much more assured and vibrant.