Movie Quote of the Day (‘All the King’s Men,’ on a Would-Be Dictator Warding Off Peril)

Jack Burden [played by John Ireland] [narrating]: “He roared across the state making speeches. All of them adding up to the same thing: 'It's not me they're after. It's you!' Willie hollered 'foul.' He knew if you hollered hard and loud enough... people begin to believe. Just in case they didn't, he organized demonstrations.”

Willie Stark [played by Broderick Crawford]: “Tell the boys to get the hicks out. Bring them in from the sticks. Empty the pool halls. Turn ‘em out! Turn the yokels out!”

Jack: “In case anyone hollered back, he organized spontaneous slugging. Willie pulled every trick he ever knew and added a few more.”—All the King’s Men (1949), written and directed by Robert Rossen, adapted from the novel by Robert Penn Warren

Seventy-five years ago this Thursday, this adaptation of All the King’s Men premiered in New York City. Though a remake came out in 2006 starring Sean Penn, the earlier version remains, for many, the gold standard, going on to win Oscars for Best Picture, Actor (Broderick Crawford) and Supporting Actress (Mercedes McCambridge).

During production of the first version, the cast and crew involved in translating Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the screen never uttered the name “Huey Long,” recalled star Broderick Crawford.

In fact, the state depicted onscreen was left intentionally unnamed, even blurred, with not even a Southern drawl, let alone the down-home Louisiana cadences of Long.

The plot of the movie, when you get right down to it, could even have been set in the American Heartland—a place like Ohio, maybe even Michigan.

Michigan—these days, the state is no longer the uncontested world center of the automotive industry, as it was during the making of this film, but a laboratory for far-right coups—not only against its governor, but, through the courts and otherwise, the Presidency of the United States.

At least Stark/Long started out with good intentions, and actually built things while in office: a highway program of 13,000 roads, free textbooks for schoolchildren, LSU Medical School, and an expansion of the state Charity Hospital System. The former occupant of the Oval Office now seeking a return only destroyed while in office. 

Re-read some of that dialogue above: “It’s not me they’re after. It’s you!” It’s all too easy to supply the contemporary follow-up: “And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution."

Back in 1989, the late New York columnist Jimmy Breslin, sourly surveying a local real-estate developer who’d just taken out a full-page ad calling for the execution of the Central Park Five, warned, “Beware always of the loudmouth taking advantage of the situation and appealing to a crowd’s meanest nature.”

That loudmouth runs from the semi-fictional Willie Stark to the all-too-actual Former Guy.