"All the King's Men"
In anticipation of not watching the new movie version, I re-read Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men" recently, and realized I'd neglected the living shit out of it in college. What was wrong with me?The book is less about the Huey Long-esque Willie Stark than it is about the disaffectedness of the real protagonist, Jack Burden. And this is real proto-noir disaffection, not the cry for help disaffection of books like "The Catcher in the Rye".
For either killing or creating may be a crime punishable by death, and the death always comes by the criminal's own hand and every man is a suicide. If a man knew how to live he would never die.and
I had dug up the truth and the truth always kills the father, the good and weak one or the strong and bad one, and you are left alone with yourself and the truth, and can never ask Dad, who didn't know anyway and who is deader than mackerel.The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 and has never gone out of print. The first movie adaptation won several Academy Awards.
I think we're going to Netflix the first movie version. Broderick Crawford looks more like my mental picture of Willie Stark than Sean Penn does, and the hubris involved in casting Anthony Hopkins as a genteel southern Judge without requiring him to change his Welsh accent makes me feel all disaffected.
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by Marty Barrett at Tuesday, September 26, 2006
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