“Even more disenchanted (than Capra's State of the Union), and leavened by no last-minute rush to join the side of the angels, was Robert Rossen's All the King's Men (1949), adapted by the director from Robert Penn Warren's novel which was in turn suggested by the career of Louisiana's governor Huey Long. Perhaps because it lost an hour's running-time before release to bring it down to 109 minutes, All the King's Men suffered from choppy continuity and unsatisfactory character motivation. Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford) is shown first as a hick lawyer moved by a seemingly sincere concern for the downtrodden. Then, as he tastes power and realizes the charismatic nature of his appeal, he changes (too abruptly) into a drunken, juggernauting egomaniac, a potential national dictator stopped only by an assassin's bullet.... But the film did have a restless, nervous intensity, full of gusto and drive and color: behind the credits we see torchlight processions, campaign barbecues, banners borne aloft proclaiming support for Stark. He is revealed in short, staccato sequences, at a football stadium, haranguing a fairground crowd, bulldozing legislators, posing for cameramen with his estranged family. All these passages, and those connected with the hustings and political campaigning, have an electric fire and vitality, utterly American.” Charles Higham & Joel Greenberg, Hollywood in the '40s