A remake of All the King's Men, winner of 1949's Academy Award for Best Picture, has just been released starring Sean Penn. Acclaimed films, and Pulitzer Prize-winning books for that matter, get remade with regularity. My sense, however--which will be affirmed or refuted upon actually seeing the movie--is that something more is at work with Penn selecting a 57-year-old film for reinterpretation.

All the King's Men is not-so-loosely based on Louisiana governor Huey Long. It tells the story of a demagogue politician and how dangerous it is for a republic when the masses to fall for such a figure. Eventually, the man of the people becomes a man against the people. The Kingfish character becomes a dictator. Is Penn trying to make a subtle statement--that he has made in more overt ways--about George W. Bush? In case audiences miss the message of his portrayal, he invokes in interviews the president by name in relation to the character he plays.

Beyond its perceived contemporary relevance, All the King's Men was selected by Penn, I suspect, for another reason. Robert Rossen, who directed, produced, and wrote the screenplay for the original All the King's Men, was, like Sean Penn's father, a Communist. But then, at least from the perspective of the Hollywood Left, Rossen went bad. Does Penn forgive Rossen? Is Rossen even in need of forgiveness?

John Howard Larson, of Hollywood Ten fame, worried that audiences might interpret the main character in Rossen's film not as Huey Long, but as Joe Stalin. He rounded up a posse of Hollywood Communists, who as a group denounced Rossen. Others had folded under such peer pressure. Rossen was cut from a different cloth. Instead of acquiesing, Rossen shouted: "Stick the whole party up your ass!" That was his way of saying he was no longer interested in membership in the Communist Party.

Though Communists like to portray the postwar years as a time of intolerance against anyone left of center, Robert Rossen's multiple Academy Awards--presented just a few weeks after Joseph McCarthy launched his crusade against Communist infiltration of the government--gives the lie to this myth. Robert Rossen was a Communist. Far from being shunned by Hollywood, Rossen received Tinsel Town's highest honor. Communists, on the other hand, exhibited less broad-mindedness. They attacked Rossen, and chased him from their ranks.

In 1951, the House Committe on Un-American Activities hauled Rossen, as they did Sean Penn's father, before them to testify about Communist influence in the film industry. Initially, Rossen, like Penn, invoked the Fifth Amendment. He didn't name the names of people who chose to hide their political affiliation. The House Committee treated Rossen more respectfully than John Howard Lawson's ad hoc Hollywood Committee had treated him, and Rossen's response--invoking the Fifth Amendment--proved less alienating than his graphic response to the badgering of the Hollywood Committee.

But invoking the Fifth Amendment regarding the activities of acolytes of a foreign power--especially when a satellite of that power was then at war with the United States--neither sat well with filmgoers nor the Hollywood businessmen who financed the films that they flocked to see. Communists, and even former Communists who refused to reveal the covert affiliations of their friends, found commerical impediments to landing work.

When HCUA called again in 1953, Rossen no longer hid behind the Fifth Amendment. He identified nearly five dozen former comrades. Was Leo Penn one of those names? That's a question I'd like to know the answer to.

Hollywood Communists devoured their own. The ghosts of former comrades came back to haunt them. As Ronald and Allis Radosh's Red Star over Hollywood notes, "The party was to find that the bitter fruit of reading people out of its ranks was disillusionment and eventual vengeance."

Who cares? The movie's gonna be a snore.

Limited patience for American history huh Mick?

Commies were right to fear that Stark would be seen as an indictment of Stalin, Long was a left-wing populist whose socialist polices, although the norm now, were capable of a real reaction in the 30s. I won't bother going to see this film but how Penn thinks he can portray Bush as a populist is beyond me. The fact that authoritarianism is standard in the presidency doesn't make it the result of populist demoagoguery.