All the King's Men (Robert Rossen, 1949)

Broderick Crawford, John Ireland, and Mercedes McCambridge in All the King's Men

Willie Stark: Broderick Crawford
Jack Burden: John Ireland
Anne Stanton: Joanne Dru
Sadie Burke: Mercedes McCambridge
Tom Stark: John Derek
Adam Stanton: Shepperd Strudwick
Tiny Duffy: Ralph Dumke
Lucy Stark: Anne Seymour
Mrs. Burden: Katherine Warren
Judge Monte Stanton: Raymond Greenleaf
Sugar Boy: Walter Burke
Dolph Pillsbury: Will Wright
Floyd McEvoy: Grandon Rhodes

Director: Robert Rossen
Screenplay: Robert Rossen
Based on a novel by Robert Penn Warren
Cinematography: Burnett Guffey
Art direction: Sturges Carne
Film editing: Al Clark, Robert Parrish
Music: Louis Gruenberg

Where psychological realism is concerned, Robert Rossen's All the King's Men plays more like a temperance lecture than a political movie. One moment Willie Stark is a naive, teetotaling reformer, faithful to his wife, and the next he's a drunken, avaricious demagogue and womanizer. All it took was a bender and a hangover, along with a little bit of disillusionment about the reason he was being promoted as a gubernatorial candidate. It's possible, however, that some of the subtlety in the characterization of Willie Stark ended up on the editing floor. The first cut of the film was notoriously overlong -- over four hours -- until it was subjected to some ruthless editing from Robert Parrish, who was called in as "editorial adviser," receiving no screen credit but rewarded with an Oscar nomination. All the King's Men is still something of a ramshackle affair in its structure and character development. While it won the best picture Oscar, it's no masterpiece. What it is, however, is a moderately good entertainment, with some effective location filming by Burnett Guffey in various California settings, and a showcase for some good performances: Broderick Crawford as Willie and Mercedes McCambridge as his factotum (and sometimes mistress, if you know how to decode the censorship runarounds) won their own Oscars, and John Ireland was nominated. But the film falls apart where it comes to politics, never quite showing how Willie managed to con the voters into their avid support while stifling and even bumping off the opposition. Instead, we get sidetracked into the relationship between Jack Burden and Anne Stanton, the melodramatic suicide of her uncle, and her brother's transformation into an assassin. Maybe someday we'll get a solid portrayal of populist demagoguery in the movies, whether based on Huey P. Long or Donald J. Trump, but All the King's Men isn't it.

Body and Soul (Robert Rossen, 1947)

Body and Soul is a well-made boxing picture, but it has a historical significance as the nexus of some major careers damaged by the anti-communist hysteria that gripped the United States in the years that followed its release. After its director, Robert Rossen, pleaded the fifth amendment at his hearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951, he was blacklisted in Hollywood. The same fate befell screenwriter Abraham Polonsky after his refusal to testify before HUAC. The star, John Garfield, testified that he knew nothing about communist activity in Hollywood, but studios refused to hire him; he made his last film in 1951 and died of a heart attack the following year, only 39. Cast members Anne Revere, Lloyd Gough, Canada Lee, and Art Smith were also victims of the blacklist. The film stands as an example of the folly of HUAC witch-hunting: With all the reds and pinkos involved in its production, you might expect it to be pure propaganda, but the only leftist message it communicates is about the danger of greed. Today the only viewers who may find Body and Soul subversively anti-capitalist are those who subscribe to the "greed is good" credo enunciated by Michael Douglas's Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987). Garfield plays an ambitious young boxer named Charley* Davis who falls prey to racketeers who manipulate his career, despite the warnings of his mother (Revere), his best friend, Shorty (Joseph Pevney), and his girlfriend, Peg (Lilli Palmer). The fight sequences, shot by James Wong Howe and edited by Francis Lyon and Robert Parrish, were groundbreaking in their realistic violence, winning Oscars for Lyon and Parrish. Howe, who is said to have worn rollerskates and used a hand-held camera to film the fights, was curiously unnominated, but nominations also went to Garfield and Polonsky. Palmer, unable to conceal her German accent or to eliminate traces of the sophisticated roles she usually played, is miscast as Charley's artist girlfriend. The script makes a half-hearted attempt to explain away the accent but mostly ignores it. One thing of note: The black boxer played by Lee calls Garfield's character by his first name, Charley, in their scenes together. The usual racial protocol was for African-American characters to call white ones "Mr." -- "Mr. Charley" or "Mr. Davis" -- the way Dooley Wilson's Sam always refers to Bogart's character as "Mr. Rick" in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1943). It's the earliest example of an assumed equality that I can recall in a Hollywood movie.

*A nitpicky note: The filmmakers never decided whether it was spelled "Charley" or "Charlie." It appears both ways on the posters advertising his fights, but it's "Charlie" in the inscription on a gift he gives Peg and in her letter addressed to him. I'm going with the way IMDb lists it.