In the wake of the Sean Penn remake, the 1949 original is out on DVD
If it worked once, the old Hollywood credo goes, it'll work again - hence, those periodic bouts of remake fever that grip the industry.
Upgrade it, today, to epidemic; it's latest victim, the 1949 Best Picture Oscar-winner All The King's Men, a Sean Penn version of which is slated for release September 22.
Will it work, or will it find a place among the skyscraper-high junk heap of recent retreads? If it's the latter, take heart; the silver lining is that the production of this film has prompted the release of the original on DVD.
The film the first version ofAll The King's Men is most often compared to is Citizen Kane. Both were produced at poor cousin studios, Columbia and RKO respectively, both subscribe to an ageless Hollywood formula - the slightly fictionalized account of the rise and fall of an American despot, a genre that ranges from Little Caesar to The Aviator - and both are propelled by the same narrative gimmick, namely, the investigation of the protagonist's character by a spellbound journalist.
But Robert Rossen, King's director, was no Wellesian magician. In King, the technical wizardry is replaced by the worn moviemaking conventions Welles' brashness usurped, from second-unit montages and generous re-use to prop newspaper headlines and aural short-cuts.
So unabashedly inexpensive is King, in fact, that two of the film's most dramatic moments are rendered in dime-store minimalism: the collapse of a fire escape full of children, reduced to the close-up of an absconding bolt with the screams of children foleyed over it, and a plot-turning car accident, represented by only a broken fence and a pair of breath-holding second leads.
But the film's break from Kane is not simply the matter of a less imaginative use of a sow's ear. The film differentiates itself dramatically as well, first and foremost in its more extensive use of the reporter. In King's Men, the nosey newshound is no pipe-smoking shadow. He's the film's Sancho Panza, a college-educated journalist who, like the citizens of the many hick towns that the extras portray, falls under the spell of Willie Stark, a version of Senator Huey Long cooked up by novelist Robert Penn Warren.
"What's so special about him?", asks the reporter in the film's opening scene. Responds his superior, "They say he's an honest man." And he remains so throughout a great deal of the film, for this is no simple tale of corruption, nor of a man's fall by his own folly a la Kane. This is the story of a man who stays true to his ideals but learns that he must play a dirty game in order to realize them.
There's a price to pay for playing this game, of course, namely, the systematic devaluation of everything held dear: a wife, a son, even (in another parallel to Welles' masterpiece) a mistress. The stakes rise dramatically when Stark-Crawford decides to play it better than anybody else, leading to the film's shocking climax.
All The King's Men is not simply a good melodrama with taut direction, including extremely effective use of low angles and a Fritz Lang-style moral ("Man is conceived in sin"), it's an extremely prophetic film as well; a crystal ball into the future of American politics, with echoes of JFK, Nixon, and - if you care to add it, and you can bet the upcoming remake will - George W.
Sean Penn has been on a streak of late, his name one of the few on the current scene synonymous with quality drama. He'll have to pull it off again here to win the distinction of best version of Warren's book - no easy feat, as Stark The First - and here we offer the new DVD release of the original as proof - plays a mean game of one-upmanship.
