A Film Canon

Despite its self-congratulatory 'interrogation' of bourgeois insularity, All The King's Men is haunted by the spectre of an imminent working-class army, refusing to make any qualitative distinction between political demonstration and nascent lynch mob, and anticipating the Communist hysteria of the 1950s. These anxieties are encapsulated in the figure of Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford), a self-made politician whose political evangelism is persistently reduced to so much inebriation; forged in a moment of conversion that allows him access to both alcohol and a rhetorical voice, and exposed after his son nearly kills a girl while drink-driving, and he, also drunk, tries to bribe her father. This trajectory is contained by the narration of Jack Burden (John Ireland), a political reporter who joins Stark on the campaign trail, and whose initial disdain for his own (literally) insular home town of Burden's Landing is ultimately mitigated, rather than confirmed, by the spectacle of this ascent, culminating with the most transgressive moment in the film - Stark's refusal to wait outside, as instructed. Not only does this subsume Stark's idiosyncratic, radical ethos of self-determination ("You're a hick, and nobody ever helped a hick but a hick himself") into more generic issues of political corruption, complicity and compromise,  but it subsumes his penetrating insights into the connections between morality and rhetoric - encapsulated both in his wry, tongue-in-cheek adoption of a biblical register, and his ability to 'call' hypocrisies that remain invisible to their bearers - into a particularly conservative conflation of morality, honour and, above all, tradition. Hence the moment that should propel Burden's self-interrogation - the discovery that Judge Irwin, an old family friend and father figure, was privy to a criticial bribe - anaesthetises it, thanks to Irwin's subsequent suicide, incredibly offered as an index of honour, rather than cowardice.