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All the King’s Men is one of the great American novels, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1947, but it has fallen from grace over the last few decades. In his novel Robert Penn Warren painted an indelible portrait of a populist politician based on Louisiana Governor and Senator Huey Long. Warren’s Southern roots (he was one of the signers of the Southern literary manifesto I’ll Take My Stand) and his skill as a poet/writer enabled him to capture a man, a place and a time in a way that still speaks to us today.
In an essay in the Yale Review, Warren later wrote of the impact of Long on the novel:
When I am asked how much All the King’s Men owes to the actual politics of Louisiana in the ’30′s, I can only be sure that if I had never gone to live in Louisiana and Huey had not existed, the novel would never have been written.
Known as “the Kingfish,” Huey Long was one of the most controversial figures of the Great Depression, part demagogue and part democrat, his slogan of “Share the Wealth” made him the scourge of big business. Long was instrumental in helping Franklin Roosevelt secure the 1932 Democratic Presidential nomination, but quickly broke with FDR after the election because he felt the President did not support his plans to redistribute wealth. Long was preparing to challenge FDR when he was assassinated in 1935, provoking one of history’s great “what ifs.”
Warren’s novel portrays Long as a tragic figure, a man fallen from grace with an almost Shakespearean eloquence. The 1949 movie that was based on the novel had sense enough to use Warren as a scriptwriter, although changed the plot to make it more melodramatic–a tone captured in one of the film’s posters:
He thought he had the world by the tail…till it exploded in his face…with a bullet attached…
Another version of the novel shot in 2006 has fallen into the obscurity it deserves. Its cast of young Hollywood heartthrobs including Sean Penn, Jude Law, and Kate Winslet seemed totally out of their element. One New York critic wrote:
I’m completely serious when I say that if it weren’t for Underworld: Evolution, All the King’s Men would easily qualify as the worst film I’ve seen this year.
It did not help that the insipid James Carville was one of the film’s executive producers.
In contrast, for all its melodrama and differences with the original novel, the 1949 film still stands up pretty well. A major reason is the searing performance of Broderick Crawford as Willie Stark, a performance which won him an Oscar. The film also won an Oscar and Mercedes McCambridge picked up a third for Best Supporting Actress.
The speech which follows occurs after Stark first tastes victory. You might note its similarity with Orson Welles’ speech in Citizen Kane, which has previously appeared in Saturday Night at the Movies.
This is not a time for speechmaking. I should get on my knees and ask God to give me strength to carry out your will.
This much I swear to you — these things you shall have: I’m going to build a hospital, the biggest that money can buy, and it will belong to you. And any man, woman or child who is sick or in pain can go through those doors and know that everything will be done for them that man can do: to heal sickness, to ease pain. Free! Not as a charity, but as a right. And it is your right. Do you hear me? It is your right.
And it is your right that every child should have a complete education; that any man who produces anything can take it to market without paying toll. And no poor man’s land or farm can be taxed or taken away from him.
And it is the right of the people that they shall not be deprived of hope.
Just to give you the flavor of Warren’s novel here is Stark talking about the same hospital:
I’m going to build me the God-damnest, biggest, chromium-plated, formaldehyde-stinkingest free hospital and health center the All-Father ever let live. Boy, I tell you, I’m going to have a cage of canaries in every room that can sing Italian grand opera and there ain’t going to be a nurse who hasn’t won a beauty contest at Atlantic City and every bedpan will be eighteen-carat gold and by God, every bedpan will have a Swiss music box attachment to play “Turkey in the Straw” or “The Sextet from Lucia,” take your choice. (p. 139)
That is writing, not Hollywood. Note how Warren builds the hyperbole by mixing the high and the low until it culminates in the final improbable image of opera and bluegrass. There is not more telling portrait of a now-extinct American political rhetoric any better than this, a rhetoric that was part tall tale, part bombast and all heart, a rhetoric in which the audience was in on the joke enough to urge the speaker to stoke the fire ever higher.
Today with the likes of James Carville advising candidates, no one speaks like that and the wink between candidate and audience has been lost.
Print Posted by: liberalamerican
