That was an excellent one.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

It's sad to find that aside from TCM, this film is not being aired on present day TV. The reason, of course, is that it was made in black and white. Yet it hasn't dated in the slightest. Nor has it outworn its power and fascination through repeated viewings. In fact it's such a richly textured movie that the more you see it, the more you appreciate its many subtleties of character and dialogue. For example, it wasn't until this time around that I realized the king's men of the Humpty Dumpty title were not just the voting hicks but the inner echelon. "He had us all now," Ireland comments off-camera, "we were all working for him." All the main characters! Great performances abound in this picture. Certainly Crawford reveals a range far beyond his usual blustering stereotype. Ireland gives the best account of his entire career. So does Mercedes McCambridge. (This was her film debut). All three were to coast on their King's Men reputations for the rest of their professional lives. In the support cast, those players who never bettered their characterizations here include Will Wright ("You have to understand that Pillsbury's not a man. He's a thing. When a thing gets busted, you fix it"), Ralph Dumke ("Pillsbury's the head man. He uses my head"), Raymond Greenleaf ("Pillsbury has to be prosecuted"), Anne Seymour, Grandon Rhodes, and Walter Burke.

The story of Willie Stark, an unassuming, unsophisticated idealistic farmer who becomes Governor of his state, and Jack Burden, reporter and Stark ally. We see how Stark fights his way up from lowly beginnings, initially failing at politics but then succeeding. However, once in office, the ideals slip, the standards fall and the power leads to corruption. Burden should be his conscience, but he finds himself going along for the ride...Powerful film. The change in Willie Stark from hero to villain makes for a great story. We are immediately drawn in, rooting for Stark. He represents the guy we all want to see succeed - the innocent underdog with good intentions. However, this is not a Disney movie or West Wing. What happens next is gritty and a pretty accurate description of politics and how it corrupts even the noblest of souls. The fact that Stark becomes the embodiment of everything he was initially railing against, and of the reason he got into politics, is delicious irony and provides a wonderful cycle to the plot.Almost as impactful is Jack Burden's story. One thinks that he would be the one person to some degree of ethics and integrity, but he is happy to sell his soul to the highest bidder. We also see how the corruption spreads like a virus, affecting even Jack's friends.Not a perfect movie though. It would have been more dramatic if Stark's slide into fascism and corruption was more subtle and slow, and we had an even spread between Good Stark and Bad Stark. Instead, Stark's transformation is almost cliff-like and the majority of the film features Bad Stark. Also, a Bob Roberts-type ending would have been superb... (can't say anything more than that for fear of spoiling it).Won the 1950 Best Picture Oscar.

The parallels to modern day politics is more than evident even if the picture is almost seventy years old. The connection to Huey Long notwithstanding, there was one point in the film when one sees only a rear view of Broderick Crawford in the Willie Stark role, and he looked to me just like George Wallace, another apt comparison I think. Stark also seemed to approach Wallace's equivalent of a fire and brimstone type orator, another populist characteristic that these sort of politicians take on.So if power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, this film ably captures the nuance of Stark's ideological world view that a man is conceived in sin and born of corruption. I don't think I've heard that philosophy expressed any more horrifically, and for those of that mindset I guess anything is possible. Jack Burden (John Ireland) in response appears willing to cut such corruption some slack when he states that 'many times, out of evil comes good'. In a roundabout way that may be true, but there's always a price to pay.The story element that I couldn't buy simply because it was so inconceivable was the idea of Anne Stanton (Joanne Dru) taking up with Stark - how hideous an idea was that? Maybe Sadie Burke (Mercedes McCambridge), that seemed more realistic, but the idea that Jack Burden could hang around with all the duplicitous dealings that personally affected him, well that was another bit of a stretch. But I guess when real people get tangled up in these sort of webs, it's hard to extract oneself. However there's one very real tip off for the viewer regarding Willie Stark's rise to power when he claims that large campaign contributions come with no strings attached. Remember now, he was a lawyer when he said it.

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.