All the King's Men (1949)

Willie Stark: Now, shut up! Shut up, all of you! Now listen to me, you hicks. Yeah, you're hicks too, and they fooled you a thousand times like they fooled me. But this time, I'm going to fool somebody. I'm going to stay in this race. I'm on my own and I'm out for blood.

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Jack Burden: Anne, Burden's Landing is a place on the Moon. It isn't real. It doesn't exist. It's me pretending to live on what I earn. It's my mother trying to keep herself young and drinking herself old. It's you and Adam living in this house as though your father were still alive. It's an old man like the judge dreaming of the past.

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Judge Monte Stanton: Pillsbury is guilty. As Attorney General of this state, it's my job to prosecute.
Willie Stark: Judge, you talk like Pillsbury was human. He isn't. He's a thing. You don't prosecute an adding machine if a spring goes busted and makes a mistake. You fix it. Well, I fixed him.

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Robert Penn Warren's novel, upon which the film was based, was published in 1946. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. Writer-director Robert Rossen purchased the film rights himself, and was then able to broker a deal with Columbia Pictures. He shifted the focus of the novel from the Jack Burden character (played by John Ireland) to Willie Stark.
The campaign montages were shot by Don Siegel.
Producer-Director Robert Rossen offered the role of Willie Stark to John Wayne. Rossen sent a copy of the script to Wayne's agent, Charles K. Feldman, who forwarded it to Wayne. After reading the script, Wayne sent it back with an angry letter attached. In it, he told Feldman that before he sent the script to any of his other clients, he should ask them if they wanted to star in a film that "smears the machinery of government for no purpose of humor or enlightenment," that "degrades all relationships," and that is populated by "drunken mothers; conniving fathers; double-crossing sweethearts; bad, bad, rich people; and bad, bad poor people if they want to get ahead." He accused Rossen of wanting to make a movie that threw acid on "the American way of life." If Feldman had such clients, Wayne wrote that the agent should "rush this script... to them." Wayne, however, said to the agent that "You can take this script and shove it up Robert Rossen's derri?re..." Wayne later remarked that "To make Huey Long a wonderful, rough pirate was great," he said; "but, according to this picture, everybody was s - t except for this weakling intern doctor who was trying to find a place in the world." Broderick Crawford, who had played a supporting role inread more facts about All the King's Men...