Academy Award for Best Picture

1949

All the King's Men

Release dates

November 8, 1949

 (premiere-United States)

January 1950 

(wide-United States)

Starring

Broderick Crawford

John Ireland

Joanne Dru

John Derek

All the King's Men is a 1949 drama film with noir themed overtones set in a political setting directed by Robert Rossen and based on the Robert Penn Warren novel of the same name. The production features Broderick Crawford in the role of the ambitious and sometimes ruthless politician, Willie Stark.

Rossen originally offered the starring role to John Wayne, who found the proposed film script unpatriotic and indignantly refused the part. Crawford, who eventually took the role, won the 1949 Academy Award for Best Actor, beating out Wayne, who had been nominated for his role in Sands of Iwo Jima.

The film was shot at various locations in California using local residents, something that was fairly unknown for Hollywood at the time. The old San Joaquin County courthouse in Stockton, built in 1898 and demolished about a dozen years after the film's release, was featured prominently.

Paul Tatara, a film reviewer for CNN, describes the film as "one of those pictures that was saved in the editing." Al Clark did the original cut but had trouble putting all the footage that Robert Rossen had shot into a coherent narrative. Robert Parrish was brought onboard by Rossen and Columbia Studios head, Harry Cohn, to see what he could do. Since Rossen had a hard time cutting anything he shot, after several weeks of tinkering and cutting, the movie was still over 250 minutes long. Cohn was prepared to release it in this version after one more preview, but this threw Rossen into a panic, so Rossen came up with a novel solution. Rossen told Parrish to "[s]elect what you consider to be the center of each scene, put the film in the synch machine and wind down a hundred feet before and a hundred feet after, and chop it off, regardless of what's going on. Cut through dialogue, music, anything. Then, when you're finished, we'll run the picture and see what we've got." When Parrish was done with what Rossen had suggested, they were left with a 109-minute movie that was more compelling to watch. After All the King's Men won its Academy Award for Best Picture, Harry Cohn, repeatedly gave Parrish credit for saving the film, even though Parrish only did what Rossen told him to do. The editing gambit gives the film a memorably jagged urgency that's quite unique for a studio-era film. Although Clark is credited as the "Film Editor" (with Parrish being credited as "Editorial Advisor"), both Clark and Parrish received a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Film Editing.