There’s a scene during the final 20 minutes of A Face in the
Crowd – the strikingly prescient and enduringly potent 1957 drama that showcases
the greatest film performance ever by the late, great Andy Griffith – that has
sufficient smash-mouth impact to make you forget, if only for a few minutes,
that you ever saw the same actor play the ingratiating peacekeeper of Mayberry.
Three years before he assumed the lead role in the long-running sitcom
that bore his name and ensured his immortality, Griffith mesmerized moviegoers
with his galvanizing performance as Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, an ingratiatingly
folksy fraud who’s discovered by a broadcast journalist (Patricia
Neal) in a small-town Arkansas jail, hired as a tale-spinning, guitar-strumming
entertainer at her radio station – and launched as a local superstar on a
relentless trajectory toward national celebrity.
Right from the start, Marcia Jeffries, the aforementioned
journalist, has ample reason to believe that this good-ol’-boy is a
ne’er-do-well whose artless sincerity is more apparent real. Still, she goes
along for the ride – motivated, evidently, by equal measures of infatuation and
ambition – when Lonesome Rhodes is hired away by a TV station in Memphis.
That is where they meet Mel Miller (Walter Matthau), a
bookish and bespectacled TV writer who’s repeatedly ribbed by the casually
anti-intellectual Rhodes for his Vanderbilt education. (I don’t have to tell
you that this guy crushes on Marcia, do I?) More important, Memphis also is
where they meet Joey DePalma (Anthony Franciosa), the conniving office
assistant to the mattress-store owner who buys commercial spots on Rhodes’ TV
show, and is so infuriated by Rhodes’ mocking presentation of his ads that he’s
only partly mollified when his sales start to skyrocket. Joey is the one who
sells Rhodes, a budding regional phenomenon, to Manhattan advertising agencies.
One thing leads to another, Rhodes – in one of the movie’s
funniest sequences – suggests a surefire way to sell a vitamin supplement of
dubious worth, and pretty soon the “Arkansas Traveler” (as Rhodes is nicknamed)
is reaching a devoted national audience of 50 million viewers and rising.
But wait, there’s more: The retired general (Percy Waram)
whose company produces the vitamin supplement – which, weirdly enough, is
none-too-subtly pitched as a 1950s version of Viagra – sees Rhodes as a
potential “wielder of opinion” who could utilize his aw-sucks soft-sell shtick
to promote widespread fealty to “a responsible elite.” Which would make Rhodes
a valuable asset in the general’s campaign to push a stuffy isolationist
senator (Marshall Neilan)
as a viable Presidential candidate.
The longer he basks in public adulation as host of a
top-rated variety show, however, the more Rhodes is convinced of his superiority
to his viewers, most of whom he secretly despises as credulous fools, and his
intimates. He claims to love Marcia – but he marries, more or less on a whim,
Betty Lou Fleckum (Lee Remick), a 17-year-old baton-twirling cutie, mainly
because he’s intimidated by Marcia’s independence, and feels safer with what he
assumes (wrongly, or course) is a docile bimbette.
And when Rhodes decides to start a different type of
national TV show, Lonesome Rhodes’
Cracker Barrel, in which he’ll offer conservative political commentary
camouflaged as nuggets of country-boy wisdom, he has little trouble bending to
his will both the general, who grudgingly signs on as a sponsor, and the
senator, who dutifully drops by to make disparaging comments about such Radical
Leftie constructs as social security and unemployment insurance. “I’m not just
an entertainer,” Rhodes rants while browbeating the general. “I’m an influence…
A force.”
That brings us to the scene where, after sending Betty Lou
into exile for her infidelity, Rhodes pays a late-night visit to Marcia’s
Manhattan apartment and, while confiding in her, drops any pretense that he’s
anything like the good-hearted homespun sage he pretends to be on TV.
Sure, he admits, he’s backing the senator for President –
selling him like any other product, really -- because the candidate has
promised him a newly created cabinet post, Secretary for National Morale. And
because Rhodes knows damn well that he can get this guy into the White House.
“This whole country’s just like my flock of sheep,” Rhodes
rants while Marcia blanches. “Rednecks. Crackers. Hillbillies. Hausfraus.
Shut-ins. Peapickers. Everybody who’s got to jump when someone else blows the
whistle…
“They’re mine,” Rhodes insists, absolutely certain of his
mastery of the unwashed masses. “I own ‘em. They think like I do.
“Only they’re more stupid than I am. So I got to think for
them.”
Marcia listens attentively. And fearfully. And then, without
fully realizing at first what goal she has improvised, she sets out to destroy
the man Mel Miller has aptly described as a “demagogue in denim.”
Like many movies that are years (if not decades) ahead of
their time, A Face in the Crowd was
neither warmly embraced by audiences nor universally praised by critics during
its initial theatrical release. During subsequent decades, however, the film –
directed by Elia Kazan
and written by Budd
Schulberg three years after they memorably collaborated for On
the Waterfront – has attained the status of an essential and
influential classic, and now is widely admired as one of the relatively few
movies (along with Network,
Quiz
Show and a small handful of others) to fully comprehend and vividly convey
the immense power of mass media to shape opinions, create icons – and, at its
worst, deceive millions.
The name Lonesome Rhodes has evolved into a kinda-sorta
shorthand for any sort of telegenic huckster whose affects a beguiling Everyman
manner to sell products and/or propaganda. When Keith Olbermann used to
sneeringly refer to Glenn “Lonesome Rhodes” Beck, his taunt struck many –
including, I’ll admit, yours truly -- as devastatingly accurate.
And when Rick Perry collapsed as a 2012 Presidential candidate
during his notorious “Oops!” moment at a nationally broadcast debate, it was
hard for some movie fans not to recall Rhodes’ climactic self-destruction
during an unguarded moment of on-the-air, open-mic candor.
Of course, anyone who wants to characterize A Face of the Crowd as a cautionary tale
about media manipulation by treacherous right-wingers must also acknowledge
that Kazan (who died in 2003) and Schulberg (who made it all the way to 2009) infuriated
folks on the Left back in the 1950s -- and, indeed, continue to be viewed
unkindly by many liberals in Hollywood and elsewhere – because the filmmakers,
both of them disillusioned ex-members of the Communist Party, infamously named
names while testifying before the House
Un-American Activities Committee. And while they lost many friends because
of their actions, they remained steadfast in their assertions that they were
motivated by love of country, not fear of blacklisting.
And yet: In his 1988 autobiography, Kazan noted with some
bemusement that, years after his and Schulberg’s HUAC testimonies, A Face in the Crowd received a rave
review in the Communist Party’s West Coast People’s
World newspaper – and a withering pan in the right-wing journal Counterattack. And while critics and
academics have suggested everyone from Arthur Godfrey to Will Rogers as
real-life inspirations for Lonesome Rhodes, the late director deemed it more
important that Schulberg “anticipated” another charismatic entertainer with
political ambitions: Ronald Reagan.
As for Andy Griffith: It’s practically impossible to
overestimate the irresistible appeal of Sheriff Andy Taylor, his beloved sitcom
alter ego, a character that seemed to embody all the best qualities of a loving
father, a reliable friend, a folksy sage, and a droll yet compassionate
observer of human foibles.
At the same time, however, it’s doubtful that even Griffith
would have claimed that throughout his half-century as a stage, screen and
television actor, he ever had a role as complexly multifaceted, or gave a
performance as fearlessly full-bodied, as he did when he made his big-screen
debut in A Face in the Crowd.
