Wordiezett So much average

Pluskylang Great Film overall

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

theclintdavis Broderick Crawford turns in a fantastic lead performance but I was ultimately disappointed by "All the King's Men," especially given the hype and weight that follow it. If you read the book first, you'll be turned off by how much the script deviates from it in major, obvious ways. But taken on its own, the movie doesn't hold up well for modern audiences largely because it feels too black & white and because of some of the choices made by the performers and the score. The music is terribly overwritten, as is the case with many movies of this era that haven't aged well. Most of the characters are played with some depth, including Willie and Jack, even if the latter is made into too much of a boy scout in this version. But Anne is played as a nitwit with all kinds of dramatic head twisting while that aforementioned score cranks up and makes her scenes feel like the end of the world has come. This movie is terribly sad and its story is a classic meditation on the corruption of power. But of you really think about it, Willie isn't all bad. Even at his worst, he was still building great infrastructure, good schools and a beautiful hospital that would treat people for free. And clearly the people continue to love him. Throwing in the salacious storyline about his boys murdering man just for standing up to him was pointless Hollywood sensationalism. The scenes featuring Willie's speeches and the montages of clips during the time passages are brilliant and still intense but much of the movie sadly feels dated and overdone. After seeing stuff like "House of Cards," this feels pretty safe.

Hitchcoc In the early part of the century, there arose a couple forces that dominated the politics of the south and potentially the nation. Father Coughlin was a radio preacher who taught a populist agenda. Huey Long was a Southern ideologue who convinced a lot of people that their lives could be better if he was able to become their spokesman. It turns out that the two of them were utterly corrupt and events put an end to their influence. "All the King's Men" is not a biography of Huey Long. The likes of Huey Long created the environment where a guy like Willie Stark could gain a foothold. Broderick Crawford gives an Academy Award winning performance as Stark. He is a man of great complexity. The movie manages to not get preachy. It shows how his campaign is intricately put together with a little bit of arm twisting and some strong arming. This is a fine movie, worth seeing again and again.

gavin6942 The rise and fall of a corrupt politician (Broderick Crawford), who makes his friends richer and retains power by dint of a populist appeal.So this was based on a novel that was inspired by Huey Long... but keep in mind it is not the story of Huey Long. No matter how much you want to say it is, and how many links you want to draw, it is not. (Because if it is, they told a completely different story from the reality.)What this actually is, is a story about corruption and power, plain and simple. It may not be true that "everybody wants to rule the world", but many people do. And many are willing to cut corners, take bribes and other dastardly things to help them succeed. Granted, as much as we dislike it, there is a certain amount of this that is politics as usual and may not ever be cleaned up. But then you have guys like Willie Stark who take it beyond the boundaries of good sense...

gbabbitt30 I've watched this movie many times over the past forty years and with changing opinion each time. There are some wonderful scenes that are tightly written, well-staged, and wonderfully acted, and they add tremendous color and life to the cinematization of a Great American Novel, but as years go by, my respect for the movie as art has diminished. Perhaps in its day, ATKM was a spectacular accomplishment, but I find it nowadays stiff and somewhat disjointed. The problem with trying to make a great book into a movie is that just cobbling the great parts out of the book together doesn't make the movie great. The Robert Penn Warren novel was extraordinarily complex and carefully paced to followed a dumb hick from the cotton fields to the pinnacle (and abuse) of power, but the movie tries to cram the entire story into the standard Hollywood two hours, and to do that, it has to lurch from high point to high point, like climbing all the Colorado Rocky Mountains by trying to hop from one fourteener to another. It just doesn't work. It's tough making a movie from a great book because lovers of the book like me will criticize it because it doesn't meet our expectations of the novel. "All The King's Men" as a book has aged like oak-casked whiskey; as a movie, the cork has leaked.