to stand on their own. There are real classics, and sometimes they can be remade to good effect. It's been done. It probably could have been done again with "All the King's Men", although I'm not so sure anyone but Broderick Crawford, who gave the coda "ten-four!" to the American lexicon in his subsequent 1950's TV series "Highway Patrol" (where he seemed forever out of place, yet it worked somehow), looked enough like Long and seemed to understand him well enough, that the 1949 original was pretty well assured a place in movie Valhalla.One ought not to break that glass unless one has a pretty damned definite notion of how to take the concept a helluva lot higher.

One gets the distinct impression with the Zaillian/Penn effort that they are both trying to convey something but forget what it is, exactly. This is hardly surprising in light of Penn's tendency to overestimate his own significance as a sociopolitical force. Simply throwing a wild man out there to rant and rave does not a Willie Stark/Huie Long make. Not even close. And Penn doesn't even remotely resemble The Kingfish, which is yet another oddity about this movie. Hell, even Paul Newman, in "Blaze", pulled off a better Long, simply because he is such a seasoned and mature actor. He wasn't trying to sell us on wild-eyed idealism in that flick: he was playing the Other Kingfish, the one who had a truly funny, crazy, self-indulgent tilt.

This time around what we seem to be getting is a glimpse of a Feuhrer in the making - or is it a messiah? I doubt anyone can really tell - or much cares.

Although it is roman a clef, the novel and film are fictions and hence unbound to the realities of Louisiana politics and political celebrity. So Penn's lack of resemblence to Huey Long is not totally problematic unless you're watching for a straight bio.

His accent, on the other hand, is. It's the same accent that DeNiro used in Cape fear, and it's from Mars, not from the South.

(Paul Newman played Earl, not Huey, Long.)

One issue that seems to be lost among the various movies and critiques is that Robert Penn Warren's classic novel is really about the narrator, Jack Burden, and not Willie Stark. The major theme of the novel - Jack's increasing maturation and realization that all we do has profound effects on everyone around us and thus ourselves - seems to be lost or ignored in the film adaptations. Willie Stark is just the main protaganist and example of the ultimate effects of personal deeds and action. Maybe that message no longer resonates among contemporary writers and filmmakers raised in a social climate where nobody is responsible for anything......

A 14-time reader of the novel.

Every screen adaptation, large and small, of this book will fail unless it comes to grips with the crucial Cass Mastern story-within-a-story with which Warren interrupts the book's narrative. A story with a lesson for Jack Burden that he doesn't 'get' until it's too late. Burden's epiphany is what gives the book its great depth; and it's a pity that this has never been clearly explored by filmmakers because this poetic and beautiful novel offers much more than just Willie Stark, who is (as another letter writer has noted) only a peripheral character, not central.

I haven't seen the new film and will probably wait for Netflix. I think the book is a masterpiece and the earlier film very good. I've read a number of reviews and it seems this is another US film concerned entirely with surface. As is stated in an earlier comment, the book is about Jack Burden with the Long/Stark character an extremely complex figure around which the plot revolves. Burden is a disaffected aritocrat who pretends to be a complete cynic while still holding on to a number of romantic illusions.These illusions are destroyed over the course of the story. It's also a great proto-noir detective story. The earlier film enlarged on this. Maybe I'll change my mind, but from clips and reviews, the remake seems to have missed everything. In the age of "Reality" television, hollywood seems unable to deal with any complexity in character or motivation.

I'm not sure what it is about the recent adaptation of ALL THE KING'S MEN, or Penn's brilliant performance as Willie Stark that Stephanie Zacharek found "incomprehensible." Seems to me that Stark's message to the black and white poor of Louisiana in that film is pretty clear, that message being that the only person willing to help a "hick" get the food, roads, education, and jobs that hicks need is going to be another "hick" like Willie Stark.

Does the statement need to be diagrammed? Parsed? Shall we go through it word by word and explain the definitions? Is there something confusing or unclear about all those shots of black and white faces listening raptly to Starks revival-preacher speeches, the scene of them all lining up to pay tribute to him?

Perhaps what puzzles Zacherek is the film's avoidance of the usual southern stereotypes. As played by Penn, Stark is a "cracker," but not the standard cracker demogogue leveraging himself into power by appealing to white racism. No, what this film zeros in on is one of the things that made Huey Long so scary to so many wealthy people back in depression era Louisiana-- he had figured out that if the black and white poor of the south united, there was little they couldn't accomplish through sheer numbers.

A southern politician in a movie is making speeches to both blacks and whites?...Does-not-fit-stereotype-does-not-compute-does-not-compute...

Or maybe what has her scratching her head and furrowing her brow is the fact that Penn's Stark is actually more complex and therefore more disturbing than Brod Crawford's corrupted, naif teddy-bear of an idealist. Unlike the earlier adaptation of Rober Penn Warren's book, this movie is emphatically NOT about idealism. It's about power. In this film, Stark's political career is not a descent of a piece with his personal plunge into alcoholism, unfaithfulness and parental neglect. No, what's outrageous and "radical" about Penn's Stark is that his cheerfully open corruption is aimed at assisting, not the rich, but the poor. THAT'S what truly sets him apart from the other politicians. His moment of revelation early on in the movie does not break him, as it broke Crawford's Stark. It simply forces him to adjust his approach to getting elected.

Penn's performance may very well be baffling to those who expect either a cut and dried villain, someone they can comfortingly dismiss as just another dishonest pollytishun from the south, or embrace as a heroic fallen man of the people. To those of us who like our stories more complicated, his performance is fascinating, enthralling, and quite "comprehensible."

This ALL THE KINGS MEN has its flaws. Kate Winslett's performance -- she doesn't even bother trying for the accent -- is pretty much a big zero, the sound track is sometimes too intrusive, and the depiction of the tragedy that propels Stark into office is oddly underplayed (in the first film, it had a punch-in-the-gut impact.) But it should not be "baffling" to a viewer open to anything beyond the usual paint-by-numbers Hollywood approach to the south and its politics.