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The Beauty Part
In mid-December--at the height of the Serious Movie Season and in plenty of time for Oscar consideration--the new version of 'All the King's Men' will show up at your multiplex. It stars Sean Penn as Willie Stark, the crude backcountry politician who starts off a hero and ends up a demagogue, Jude Law as the idealistic reporter who becomes Willie's apologist, and Kate Winslet, James Gandolfini, Patricia Clarkson, Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Hopkins. That's a lot of star power.
The film presumably asks the same two questions posed by the 1949 movie--which won Oscars for its director, Robert Rossen, and its stars, Broderick Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge--and the 1946 novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Robert Penn Warren and is generally considered the greatest of all American political novels.
One question is a simple one: Can an honest politician stay honest and succeed?
The other is more complex: Can good come from evil? Put another way, can a politician who wants to help his people do corrupt things to gain and maintain power without corrupting himself and tainting whatever he does manage to accomplish?
Trust me: You want to read or rent All the King's Men.
The film presumably asks the same two questions posed by the 1949 movie--which won Oscars for its director, Robert Rossen, and its stars, Broderick Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge--and the 1946 novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Robert Penn Warren and is generally considered the greatest of all American political novels.
One question is a simple one: Can an honest politician stay honest and succeed?
The other is more complex: Can good come from evil? Put another way, can a politician who wants to help his people do corrupt things to gain and maintain power without corrupting himself and tainting whatever he does manage to accomplish?
Trust me: You want to read or rent All the King's Men.
