Comparing

Introduction

Robert Rossen and Elia Kazan's are primarily concerned, to represent social and political content, such as All the King's Men, The Hustler, On the Waterfront, and A Face in the Crowd. These movies concerns with the social and political prejudice and unjustness and the corruption found in sports and entertainment world. Movies illustrate the circumstances and moral limitations of the characters while taking the important decisions; accomplishment and frustration, the arduous exercises of power, the existential sense of happiness, or alcoholism liberating (Watkins, pp. 155). Robert Rossen and Eliza Kazan have dealt with the significance of politics in their own distinctive styles.All the King's Men (1949)

All the King's Men is a film directed by Robert Rossen released in 1949. It is a good political movie that only comes up short against the original, as a companion piece to the book the film inevitably disappoints, but taken on its own terms it is a fairly decent movie. Both book and film tell the story of Willie Stark, a man who begins as an idealistic, rural lawyer crusading against political corruption in his (unspecified) state, but only gains power after he becomes a cynical demagogue, as seen through the eyes of Jack Burden, the black sheep of a wealthy family, a former reporter, and Stark's right-hand man. The difference is in the emphasis; the book's focus is on Burden, and his moral development as seen in relation to the polar opposition of the pragmatic, Machiavellian Stark and the unbending, idealistic doctor Adam Stanton. Of course, Burden's moral struggles take place largely in his own mind, and as such do not lend themselves easily to filming (Warren, pp. 67). Probably sensibly, the movie chooses to focus mainly on Stark's political rise and moral decline, with Burden's role reduced to more of an audience surrogate than a character in his own right.

No one in the cast sounds very Southern, giving the movie a somewhat timeless, disassociated feeling. Still, the film makers convincingly evoke a world of back, country towns and back room politics, with little of the glamour associated with Hollywood films of this period. The performers are excellent, if also fairly vague in terms of background. Broderick Crawford's Stark is convincing both as a naive country lawyer and a cynical demagogue, and John Ireland effectively portrays the moral struggles of Jack Burden. Mercedes McCambridge, who previously seen in the unlikely role of a lesbian Mexican gang member, in Touch of Evil, is more ideally cast here as Stark's tough-minded adviser Sadie Burke. Warren claimed that the book partly inspired by the similarities he saw between Huey Long and Mussolini.

Understandably for a post-WWII movie, Rossen's adaptation pumps up the references to fascism and make Stark a much more clear-cut villain. He has his own private army of black-shirt style, leather jacket-wearing cops, stages a political rally that looks like a small-scale version of Nuremberg, and by the end even revealed to have ordered an assassination. Unfortunately, Rossen's changes oversimplify the book and greatly reduce the impact of Stark's climatic assassination by Adam Stanton, ...