If the Academy Award selection board members fail to recognize "All the King's Men" as the best movie of 1949, they will be overlooking some of the best acting, directing, and script writing to appear in recent years.

Based on Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, "All the King's Men" is the story of Willie Stark in his rise to state governorship. It is a picture with a delayed-action moral, and that is the source of the film's greatness. You don't realize you have been listening to an earnest damning of present day politics until you can unglue your eyes from the screen and start thinking.

Broderick Crawford deserves an Oscar for his portrayal of Willie Stark. Crawford, an ex-grade B gangster-western badman, emerges from the strict typecasting of his former roles to characterize a man whose moral standards change to meet political requirements. Stark begins as a poor farmer, ambitious to improve living conditions for him and his kind in the state. He winds up a miniature Huey Long-type dictator whose main concern for state improvement is vote-getting. But Crawford's fine characterization never overplays the good or the bad to make the moral painful.

Part of this is due to a good script and fine direction. Stark's campaign speeches are the best example. They clearly show the transition from the rough, sincere desire of a man to serve the public to a skilled politician's desire to please the folks at home. Up for Academy Award recognition, along with Crawford, are John Ireland and Mercedes McCambridge for their portrayal of Governor Stark's cynical hatchetman and hatchetwoman. They should get their Oscars, too. And the same goes for director Robert Rosson for weaving a fast-moving narrative, a penetrating character analysis, and a moral into one fine move.