Surprisingly, I liked this one.
Not a political person myself, I thought it would be dull, but it's an interesting and well acted movie.
It's about a small town "hick," as Willie Stark calls himself, who struggles to get into office in order to fight against corruption in the government. He makes it all the way to the governor's seat, but along the way, he becomes the very embodiment of the corruption he was striving to fight. Apparently it's based on a true story (the story of a governor named Huey Long).
I liked seeing how all those around him went through similar transitions: the narrator becomes his lackey, the narrator's fiancee becomes Stark's mistress, the fiancee's brother turns to murder, the judge is driven to suicide, Stark's adopted son becomes reckless and suffers a devastating car accident. They are all, in some way, pulled into Willie Stark's sphere of eroding morality and brought down.
After watching this movie, I checked out the new star-studded version (Jude Law, Sean Penn, Anthony Hopkins, Kate Winslet, etc.), but turned it off after half an hour. There is just no comparison. It doesn't capture the moral journey Stark goes through like the original does.
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