Vol. 17 No. 1 1950 - page 82

FILM
CHR 0 NI ( LE
WARREN, FAULKNER, AND HOllYWOOD
The producers of both
All the King's Men
and
Intruder in
the Dust,
have meant, really, to create works of art.
All
t~e
King's Men
has some exciting runs of film journalism,
Intruder in the Dust
some rich–
ly chiaroscuroed shots of the Mississippi locale (though Yoknapataw–
pha County seems oddly deflated when placed on mere earth.) Neither
film, however, absorbs the imagination of a serious spectator in the
way a successful work of art should. Yet they are the best Hollywood
can do-a fact that should be considered by those intellectuals who have
recently discovered the cosmic potential of American culture.
Of the two films,
All the King's Men
is the more interesting; it
raises complex problems about the relationship of a movie to the book
on which it is based, and it provides an indirect commentary on the
career of one of our more gifted writers. In
Night Rider
Robert Penn
Warren restored to the American novel two rare qualities: a genuine
sense of the dramatic and a concern with political ideas, or at least with
the consequences of those ideas.
All the King's Men,
despite its immense
vitality, represented a decline in his work, for it was marred by a con–
fused intellectual conception and a style which, while frequently a thing
of splendor, raised uneasy memories of Hollywood toughness. The film
retains the vitality but enlarges the confusion. Hollywood seems to have
an invariable gift, in its adaptations, for hitting at precisely the center
of an author's weakness.
In the film Warren's hero, Jack Burden, is drawn to the plebeian
demagogue, Willie Stark, because he seems a source of fresh energy;
there is also the usual talk about building hospitals and roads, pitiful
chatter in a work with serious pretensions. About the most serious ob–
jection that anyone in the film raises to Stark is that mid-way in his career
he becomes egocentric, and corrupt. Even at the film's end Burden, who
is presumably to dedicate himself to the people, fails to understand
that egocentricity and corruption are merely frills on the essential moral–
political rottenness of a quasi-fascist like Stark. The film treats Burden's
attachment to Stark as if it were a genuine moral problem
to
be taken
seriously in its own terms, rather than a problem in the psychology of
totalitarian affiliation. But Jack Burden is no Pietro Spina or Kyo whose
wrestlings with a historical commitment involve even those who reject
that commitment; he is just a poor befuddled newspaperman doing the
dirty work for a cheap demagogue. His only real problem is that he is
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