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"Please, let's not talk politics." Enigma of Huey Long, Citizen Kane treatment. That rarity in the field, "an honest man," from county treasurer to attorney at law to governor, nothing going for him but persistence. "Log-cabin Abe Lincolns with price tags on 'em," and there's the rural candidate (Broderick Crawford) who bores audiences with facts and figures but comes to life half-soused before a carnival microphone. "The hick vote," seized with the help of the fierce strategist (Mercedes McCambridge). Promises of roads and hospitals, an entourage of thugs (including his own militia), the little black book of dirty secrets. Observing it all is the tag-along journalist (John Ireland), who rejects his aristocratic background to turn campaign confidante. "You have tender sensibilities for a hatchet man." Rise and fall, not Humpty Dumpty but a burly comet, many shades of idealism and compromise analyzed by Robert Rossen. Original morality is the family shack with the plain wife (Anne Seymour) and the defiant son (John Derek), the latter nearly runs over the camera in a roadside spill. Blackmail and intimidation and even murder, a backroom bromide ("good out of back") is meant to excuse them. Fascinating fascism so soon after the end of the war, the cult of personality that mushrooms freely in American soil amid mobs and torches, cf. Meet John Doe. (The Capra element is accentuated with punchy montages courtesy of Don Siegel.) The honorable judge with feet of clay (Raymond Greenleaf), his daughter (Joanne Dru) falls under the populist's spell so her brother (Shepperd Strudwick) takes a stand in a bullet-riddled dénouement remembered by Penn in The Chase. "Me, I'm a modern man. The twentieth-century type. I run." Kazan's A Face in the Crowd furthers the inquiry. With Ralph Dumke, Katherine Warren, Walter Burke, Will Wright, and Grandon Rhodes. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |