All the King's Men

As it happens, I have just completed several weeks of close study of Robert Penn Warren's 1946 novel, All the King's Men.  The Pulitzer Prize winning book is big, bullish, pulsing with Great American novel testosterone.  The novel is nothing if not ambitious -- the author wants to devise a mythology sufficient to capture the life and times of the great Popularist Huey Long (Popularist politicians, generally, express Fascist sentiments -- to be convinced of this one only needs to behold the Stalinist tower of the Louisiana state house, one of Long's monuments -- while at the same time posing various theological and metaphysical questions about human nature and the cosmos.  The big existentialist questions of the era are writ large:  how should we act in the default of God and any plausible organized religion? Do men have free will or are they merely automatons?  What do the vexed relations between men and women, mothers and sons, sons and fathers tell us about our destiny?  Robert Penn Warren wants to put his harpoon into all of these big fish while at the same time maintaining a veneer of closely observed, realistic detail:  the book has the patina of Walker Evans' photographs of the deep South during the Depression .  Furthermore, the book has a complicated structure of flashbacks, flashforwards, reveries embedded in memories, historical digressions, and a fancy style that mixes the casually vulgar demotic with highfalutin' rhetoric that would have shamed Faulkner:  at the end of the book, Robert Penn Warren's symbolically freighted hero (and twisted narrator) Jack Burden must face up to "responsibilities" of Time while venturing forth into "the convulsions of History."   A final element of the book is that the author insists reality is a seamless web and, therefore, his prose, poetically inflected with all sorts of leit motifs and extended metaphors, must all be construed as a single seamless flow of narrative.

Of course, these aspects of the famous book render it difficult to adapt into a film.  Today, the book would be reproduced as a Netflix mini-series, maybe 8 or 13 hours long (perhaps like Fassbinder's self-defeating Berlin Alexanderplatz 15 hours long with a coda invented by the director that adds another hour.)  This strategy tends to diminish the work adapted -- most novels can't stand expansion to great length and, literally filming everything in sight, tends to show that most of what's in the book isn't worth putting on celluloid.  Hollywood during the classic era would just re-write the whole thing, relying on the fact that our memories of books that we have read (even those that we love) are pretty damn imprecise.  But this won't work for a novel that has won important literary prizes and that, therefore, is well-known to potential filmgoers.  There's another approach, a literal adaptation that uses a telegraphic style to notate the film -- this radical approach to adaptation relies upon the viewer to know the book so well that he or she can supply narrative and thematic integument that is merely alluded to, albeit objectively and with total fidelity to the source text:  this  is how Straub and Huillet adapted Heinrich's Boell's novel (   ) in their 38 minute micro-budget film Nicht Versoehnt ("Not Reconciled) -- Straub and Huillet push this technique to its ultimate conclusion in later films in which an actor simply stands in a landscape relevant to the text and reads an hour's worth of quotations from the writing.)

Steve Zallian is probably Hollywood's most ambitious screenwriter -- he has written films as various as Schindler's List, Amistad,, Searching for Bobbie Fischer and, most recently, Scorsese's The Irishman.  In 2006, Zaillian released an all-star version All the King's Men with Sean Penn playing the role of Willie Stark (Penn Warren's name for Huey Long).  Zaillan's approach to adaptation is simple enough -- he preserves about half of the key moments in the novel, and, even, films them with slavish fidelity, but he eliminates about 2/3rds of the book.  Penn Warren's book, to the extent that it was a roman a clef, was coy about its source material -- the book happens in some unnamed southern State with city's that are composites of various places in the old South.  Penn  Warren's coy approach to his source is eschewed in Zaillan's film.  He made the picture in Louisiana, shooting many scenes in New Orleans and Baton Rouge -- the State was so eager to see itself portrayed in the movie and much of the film was made on literal location, that is, shot in the monumenta Louisiana Capitol Building and, even, within the governor's inner sanctum, the imperial office suite that Huey Long built for himself.  The book is so eager to declare its truthfulness with respect to the story of Huey Long that it incorporates locations that I don't recall from the book:  Long had a habit of living in luxury hotels and some of the film is shot in an expensive hotel in New Orleans where the governor actually resided.  Zaillan adapts the book as a historical novel -- something that Penn Warren said that it was not -- and one of the movie's producers in the redoubtable and grotesque Cajun political wizard, James Carville.

Zaillan omits the Cass Mastern story -- a thirty page parable that Penn Warren devised to illustrate his notion that history is an inextricable and seamless web; this is not surprising because the story reverts back to the Civil War and reads like (very) bad Faulkner.  The curse of an adaption that operates by omission is that inexplicably certain elements of the novel are references that the director and screenplay have omitted.  For instance, the book contains a long sequence about Jack Burden's marriage to his first wife -- in keeping, with the era in which the book was written, the novel is full of salacious sexual stuff.  At one point, Jack mentions his first wife, but, then, the subject is completely abandoned -- so why have him mention her in the first place?  There are a couple of shots showing Tom Stark (Willie's football hero son); Tom's fate drives the book's tragic denouement but the character is absent from the film.  This eliminates the carefully designed symmetries in the novel's last half -- the wounding of Willie's son on the gridiron carefully designed to echo and mirror, Jack  Burden's act in destroying his own father, and Willie's blackmail using a victim of one of Tom's seductions for political gain -- Penn Warrren's seamless web is partly based on Baroque and elaborate family connections, including the surprise revelation that Jack  Burden is the son of the Judge his blackmail drives to suicide. Not surprisingly, this theme is too complex and so Zaillan omits it but imperfectly -- why put in the scene of Tom playing football unless you are going to use that narrative as part of the novel.  Zaillan adds a couple things to the movie that were not in the book -- there's a weird, implausible scene where a stripper gyrates while Jack and Willie conspire and Zaillan recognizes the weakness in motivation with respect to the final assassination scene.  In the novel, Adam Stanton (played by a gloomy, glaring Steve Ruffalo) murders Willie because he has learned that his sister, whom he idealizes, is sleeping with the corrupt politician and possibly has influenced him to appoint Adam as medical director for Willie's pet vanity-project, a world-class charity hospital.  Readers of the book often find this motivation unconvincing -- Zaillan beefs up Adam's outrage by having him informed that he will be blamed for fraud when Willie reneges on the charity hospital and simply pockets the cash raised for the project (this is completely alien to the novel and, in fact, falsifies a key aspect of the book which is Willie's sincerity with respect to the charity hospital project).  Zaillan finds a visual metaphor, however, better than Penn Warren's book -- the refined Adam plays piano to solace himself and, just before the climax, we see the elegant grand piano completely trashed as a convincing image for Adam's rage and self-destructive fury.  The beautiful Patricia Clarkson doesn't effectively simulate the feral Sadie Burke, Willie's girlfriend and protector in the novel -- in the book, she's described as a frightening but seductive Medusa-like figure with smallpox-cratered face.  Patricia Clarkson is too pretty and nice for the part. (Instead of railing at her scarred face, Clarkson is like a matron in a Tennessee Williams' play, she laments her lost youth.)  Ruffalo is good as Adam.  Anne Stanton, Ruffalo's patrician sister, is played very blandly by Kate Winslet, also an actress to voluptuous and womanly to be convincing in the part -- in the novel, Penn Warren conceives of the woman as a corrupted, austere madonna, a spinster-whore.  The actor playing the thug, Sugar Boy, is very good and looks the part.  James Gandolfini is excellent as the paragon of corrupt politics, Tiny Duffy, although his accent sometimes slips back into Tony Soprano.  (The rogue's gallery of crooks in the book, for instance, Gummy Larson, are absent from the film.)

Viewers will have to make up their own minds about Sean Penn -- the actor is always a polarizing figure.  I don't like his performance but, objectively, it's probably impressive.  Penn is a method actor and he uses a mumbled, bellowing diction for his speeches.  He's fundamentally corrupt from his first scene in the film (in which he insists on drinking soda pop among politicos guzzling beer) -- Penn Warren's conception is that of a naive country boy corrupted by politics.  Sean Penn seems ruined from the first shot to his last dying gasp and I didn't have any sense of a great man with great aspirations brought low.  The DVD doesn't conceal the connection to Huey Long and, indeed, includes an indispensable featurette about the politician -- this is a mistake as far as Penn's performance goes.  Huey Long, on film, is completely fascinating and one can see how he imposed his will on those around him.  First, he's not a method actor -- there isn't a hint of sincerity in anything Huey Long says.  He seizes his audience by shrewd complicity with them:  he's like Trump or Hitler:  you don't believe this bullshit, my friends, and I don't either but lets, for the sake of argument pretend or act like we do.  Long's eyes are totally detached from what he is saying.  He is completely calculation at all times and his gestures are like the histrionic postures that 18th century opera performers used on stage -- totally artificial, even robotic, but, also, weirdly compelling.  Penn imitates Long's motions and some of his diction, but he's simply too authentic.  Because he's a method actor, he believes what he is saying.  But the point about Huey Long is that he never believed anything he said -- every word was spoken to achieve some kind of effect.  When we see Long, in a newsreel, commenting that FDR's acronym-named agencies represent a "St. Vitus dance of corruption", Long smacks his lips a little, and makes his Fred Flintstone face look long and sad for an instant -- but he's obviously very pleased with himself.  Huey Long, at least on film, doesn't scream or shout his words, but speaks in an eerie, ultra-swift monotone like an actor in a screwball comedy or one of the fast-talking journalists in The Front Page.  Penn's acting is simply too good -- he uses every technique to be believable; Huey Long didn't bother about credibility -- he assumed that everyone was in on the joke.

Zaillan updates the movie to the late fifties -- although his sense of time is imperfect; in some of the flashbacks we see Model T type cars from much too early in history, if we accept the proposition that the action is taking place in 1958.  I think Zaillan changes to film's time from the late twenties to the late fifties so that he include many handsome and dignified-looking Black extras in the movie.  (Penn Warren refers to African-Americans as "niggers" and they don't have any role in the book at all -- of course, in the Jim Crow South they didn't vote and so were political non-entities.)  The movie goes wrong in its last ten minutes.  The assassination scene is over-dramatized and includes a totally pointless symbol:  Willie and his assassin, Adam, lie dead on the floor atop a bas relief of the Seal of the Great State of Louisiana.  Their blood flows into grooves in the floor and gradually comes together to coalesce in a stain spreading on the floor between their bodies.  The imagery implies that the two men are "blood brothers" -- their blood picturesquely flowing through veins in the floor to combine.  Penn Warren's book has some fancy rhetoric about Willie and Adam dying in an "agony of the will:  that is, the man of action striving to achieve an ideal and the idealist striving to act in the real, corrupt world.  But that trope doesn't occur in the movie and, so, we have no idea what the commingling of the blood is supposed to mean, if anything, at the end of the movie.

More than an hour of featurettes accompanies the 2006 film -- but no one ever mentions the obvious elephant in the room, the 1949 version of the movie by Robert  Rossen that won two Academy Awards and remains famous.  It's as if the people who made the 2006 movie are pretending that the earlier, and highly celebrated, version doesn't exist.  This is disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst.

In fact, Rossen's bitter and frenetic All the King's Men is immeasurably superior to Zaillan's re-boot.  Rossen understands that in films you must show not tell -- for instance, he depicts the collapse of the fire-escape at the elementary school, the tragedy on which Willie erects the edifice of his political career. (Further, Rossen's depiction is perfectly pitched:  we see a classroom, hear a bell, and, as the teacher announces a "fire drill", the film cuts to students in the hallways and, then, walking down the metal exterior stairs.  Rossen actually plays the tiny scene for suspense, cutting back and forth between the mooring of the steps in the rotten brick and the children descending the fire escape.  When the steps rip free from the brick, we hear screams but don't see the havoc.  If Rossen had shown the children falling and mangled, the film's emphasis would have been all wrong -- the movie would have been diverted into a film briefly about a rural school tragedy.  Rather, Rossen cuts to the funerals where Willie is acclaimed as the one honest politician in the county.  The grief of the parents is assumed but not explicitly shown except in long-shot.  The entire scene is a model of concision precisely calibrated to the emotional necessities of the film as a whole.)  Rossen's adaptation, conceived at the height of film noir, is brisk and tight as a drum -- in purely narrative terms, the plotting is much better than Robert Penn Warren's creaky Southern Gothic devices in the novel. Multiple characters are condensed into a single figure:  the incorruptible Judge Irwin and Hugh Miller, the Lafayette Escadrille war hero and Attorney General, are combined into one role, Judge Stanton (presumably the uncle of Adam and Anne Stanton) -- this makes logical sense, particularly because Rossen eliminates the oedipal plot that requires Jack Burden to inadvertently destroy his own father.  (It's interesting that neither the 2006 nor the 1949 versions wades into these murky waters -- in 1949, presumably, this aspect of the story was thought to be too unappetizing and immoral to be portrayed on film; in 2006, the director and screenwriter perceive that the plot really doesn't go anywhere in terms of narrative -- although it is integral to several of Penn Warren's more questionable themes about human knowledge and the inextricable web of destiny in which we are all entangled.)  Rossen, who, like Zaillan, both wrote and directed the film, hews far more closely to the novel, although eliminating many of the author's subplots and dead-ends.  As in the novel, Rossen's Sugarboy stutters badly -- this was deemed politically incorrect (mockery of the disabled) in 2006.  In the 1949 version, Sugarboy is much more fully realized character -- indeed, part of the film's pathos lies in Sugarboy's deeply felt and uncompromising loyalty to the boss.  Rossen shows us Sugarboy leaping to Willie's defense when he delivers his first great speech about how he is a hick and that someone has to represent the hicks in the State.  Rossen is fantastically economical -- Sugarboy's lunging to defend Willie at the rally is just something we glimpse, but details like this work as cinema, as character expressed in action, and they are very effective.  Rossen makes no attempt to imagine the action in the Deep South.  In one scene, we can see snow-capped mountains and the movie's rural sequences take place in those eerie bald and green foothills to the Sierra Nevada around Dublin and the Central Valley.  The State House is not the giant erection of Huey Long, a massive Art Deco mausoleum of power, but an old county Court somewhere in California -- there are palm trees growing on its lawn.  And, yet, despite the appearance of the film, it is much more political (the 2006 version like Penn Warren's novel is more of a character study) and, in fact, seems to cleave far more closely to the historical facts relating to Huey Long.  This can be observed in Willie's aspirations for the presidency, prominent in the 1949 version, and the little detail of the State police charging the assassination scene with machine guns firing.  (An example of Rossen's fidelity to the novel is the very first shot -- an image of a slab of highway plopped down on rural country:  this corresponds to the first sentences in the book.)

Part of the appeal of a film made from a bestselling novel is that the director (and screenwriter) are licensed to change the plot and, even, suggest that a different ending is forthcoming -- or, at the very least, possible.  Rossen improves considerably upon Penn Warren's narrative leading up to the assassination -- he compresses Tom Stark's iniquities into a single short scene involving a drunk-driving episode in which a girl is killed.  Rossen gives Tom Stark a few speeches that Penn Warren didn't write, creating a strong narrative of conflict between father and son, an improvement on the book.  Willie makes Tom play in the big game notwithstanding a concussion suffered in the car crash -- this leads to Tom's injury and paralysis.  Later, when Willie is impeached, the politician pulls out all the stops and, actually, campaigns against his enemies with both Lucy, his much aggrieved wife, and the crippled Tom on the platform for pathos.  (This is far more cynical than anything Penn Warren imagined.)  It takes the novelist twenty pages and several Gothic scene-changes (including a passage set in an asylum) for Penn Warren to show us that Sadie Burke is behind Willie's assassination -- she has taunted Adam into committing the crime.  But  Rossen is making a film noir and he understands that the logic of the form is inevitable -- of course, Sadie Burke is the villain, the feme fatale who will, in effect, kill  her lover for spurning her.  This is the ineluctable pattern of film noir and Rossen can accomplish the novelist's labored revelation with a single shot -- the haughty and regal Sadie striding remorselessly past the scene of carnage.   She's like Kriemhilde in Fritz Lang's Niebelungenlied.. 

Rossen's narrative is driven by delirious montages.  At  the climax of the film when Willie's acquittal from the impeachment forms a confluence with Adam Stanton's fury, the movie has become a hallucinatory political treatise.  In film noir, the city is a text, it is full of labels and billboards and signs -- writing are everywhere in dream-like abundance, but we can't quite decipher what they mean.  Similarly, the documentary-style montages at the climax all feature texts inscribed in stone, utterances carved into marble facades about justice and the will of the people as well as innumerable signs carried by Willie's supporters.  All of these writing are characteristic of crime films of this era, but they also propel the film forward into its political theme, here not as a subtext, but the full-blown expression of nascent proto-Fascism.  Rossen's montages which seem to fill about a tenth of the picture are dense strings of half-glimpsed images often superimposed over one another to carry maximum meaning.  Everything gives the impression of being tightly packed together -- although the film is shorter than the 2006 version, it feels longer and is so crammed with plot elements that the viewer is a little overcome, even exhausted.  There's simply too much here.  Rossen's cameraman fills the screen with crowds and most of his shots have between three to five figures in the frame.  Everything is in debate or debatable.  The director uses close-ups sparingly so that they have great power -- an example is a shot showing Lucy's face and her sense of sorrow entwined with pride, a complex emotion, when Tom acknowledges his responsibility for the car crash -- and, thereby, defies his father.  Every possible narrative technique is used to illumine the action -- Burden's Landing, a genteel bayou retreat, is here shown in formulaic shots as a place set apart from the activity of the rest of the State; you reach the place, which is an island, by a ferry, a detail wholly invented by Rossen but which is superior to Penn Warren's verbose maundering about that place.  This use of symbolism is combined with other classical techniques -- Rossen deploys a Citizen Kane -style newsreel documentary to provide information to the viewers.  He organizes his shots around objects with the camera pivoting to different views -- generally, the shots are structured around something seen in one image, then, viewed from a different angle in the next shot.  A noteworthy example of this is a sequence filmed in shots that pivot around a still-life of Willie's huge boots in the foreground.  The movie gives the sense of layers upon layers of information with which we are bombarded.

Rossen's film won two Academy Awards -- one for Best Picture and another for Mercedes McCambridge's performance as Sadie Burke.  Broderick Crawford's Willie is very closely based upon descriptions of the book -- for instance, we see his slight wink at Jack  Burden in an early scene.  He seems more of the "happy warrior" than the tormented figure played by Sean Penn -- Penn wanted to impersonate Huey Long; more sensibly, Broderick Crawford just plays the part of Willie as imagined by the novelist.  In the 1949 version, Willie is much more overtly corrupt than in either the novel or the 2006 film.  We get a sense that Willie is a man of immense and implacable appetites.  This is depicted in microcosm in an almost imperceptible close shot at the beginning of the film -- Lucy is talking idealistically and Willie seems to listen, but, in fact, we see that he is entirely occupied, indeed, preoccupied with eating a morsel of food, possibly fried chicken.  His appetite come first and this is exemplified in the final scene in which the dying Willie mutters: "Why'd he do it?  I could have been the whole world."  This questions emphasizes Willie Stark's criminality:  he sounds like a dying gangster in Scarface  or White Heat  -- by contrast, Penn Warren's emphasis is on destiny and free-will and he has Willie say, dying in bed a few days after he is shot:  "It could have been different."  Crawford's Willie dies like a gangster, surprised that he isn't as immortal as he thought he was.  John Ireland as Jack Burden is homely and, in fact, looks like Robert Penn Warren.  Warren's novel is really about Jack Burden's growth as a man -- Willie is secondary to that narrative.  Rossen ignores all of Jack's philosophizing and ignores most of his back-story -- the romance with Anne Stanton is virtually eliminated.  This is because Rossen's All the King's Men is about Willie Stark and not Jack Burden. Mercedes McCambridge is astonishing as Sadie Burke -- she performs the role as a wise-cracking dame from screwball comedy, but with a savage, even feral edge.   She's the embodiment of the woman who succeeds because she is tougher and more cynical than the men around her.  McCambridge delivers her lines in clipped fashion, through tight thin lips and she dresses like a Lesbian dominatrix, sporting men's suit coats with padded shoulders.  In one scene, she glares at herself in the mirror and says that small-pox has made her face hard -- as opposed to the soft features of her nemesis, Anne Stanton.  (The crucial plot element of Sadie's ugliness is completely eliminated in the 2006 version which simply makes hash of the character).  In the novel, Sadie boasts that she has "calmed down" Willie when he gets drunk before his big speech about being a hick -- we know what this means, a sexual allusion that Penn Warren, for once, doesn't feel the need to explain.  In the 1949 film, Sadie makes the boast and, then, draws a brush through her hair lasciviously -- that's all the actress needs to do for us to understand what has happened. 

A good film adaptation doesn't seek to replace the book on which it is based.  Rather, it relies upon the book as closely as possible consistent with being a successful movie.  The movie has to stand on its own two feet, because many (if not most) viewers will not have read the book.  But it also should supplement our understanding of the book -- if we have read the book, we should appreciate and enjoy the ingenuity with which the film adapts its source material.  In this way, the movie improves upon the book from a narrative point of view, while our understanding of the themes of the story is made more profound by the novel.  A novel gives us profundity; a film hints at profundity but relies upon appearances and formulaic plotting --  Rossen's development of Penn Warren's Pulitzer-prize winning book as a film noir, a discreditable genre but one  that is ideal to the story, illustrates how a movie can disclose the inner essence of a novel in a way that doesn't displace the book but, rather, highlights what is excellent and important about it.