A Face in the Crowd

Same as it ever was

Same as it ever was

"Lonesome" Rhodes, in all his caffeinated rebel yelling, might've seemed like a fantasy to audiences in 1957.  Perhaps like Howard Beale did in 1976.  What compels these men to grandstand on the airwaves, literally screaming their observations about the American Dream? Beale was in a post Watergate, post Vietnam society of burnout.  A society sobered by continuous televised footage of war atrocities and assassinations.  Rhodes is wagging his finger at a A Leave it to Beaver era audience that may or may not emulate that buttoned down veneer, but he's also got that finger on their pulse.  The stale marriages, the vain attempts to keep up the vanilla, mom and apple pie facade.  Lonesome spews folksy tales and sings songs about the everyday American, and they love every minute.  He achieves a level of fame so pronounced that he is seriously considered for the President's Cabinet.  Who is this man?

Not long before, Larry Rhodes (Andy Griffith) was a drifter lying in a drunk tank in a small Arkansas town.  Local radio host Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal) gives him a mic and tries to coax something interesting out of him for her show.  It isn't until the sheriff promises to release him the following day that Rhodes pulls out his guitar and howls a paean to rural life and love, clearly wowing the young woman.  She dubs him "Lonesome" and not long after he's a local sensation on the radio, then on to a Memphis television program, where his unfiltered honesty leads him to insult the show's sponsor, a mattress company entrepreneur, and his product.  No matter.  Folks love Lonesome and even as his denigrating rants lead some to set fire to the mattresses in the street, the company's sales go through the roof.

From there, the firebrand yokel goes national, getting bigger and increasingly uncontainable.   The cult of personality can turn the tide either way.  If you have a figure like Lonesome to persuade the masses, you can get away with almost anything.  Most folks don't act on intellect or careful analysis. They may not smell a faker until the underbelly is right in their faces.

I'm sure this scenario does not remind you of any current political figures.  Funny how ahead of their time movies like A FACE IN THE CROWD or NETWORK really are. Screenwriter Budd Schulberg (adapting his short story "Your Arkansas Traveler") seems to have a crystal ball of sorts.  But as with Paddy Cheyefsky's later screenplay, the men saw the handwriting on the wall.  The consumerism, the commercialization.  Lonesome is brought in to help inspire a vitamin company to market their pill as sexy, even if a chemist analyzes the supplement as near worthless.  Who cares? People take to placebos like fish to water.  In a dazzling series of ruthless parodies of commercials, the Vitajex product is even touted as a male potency enhancer! This is the late 1950s!

Director Elia Kazan has a firm handle on such scenes, and on his lead actor, who is ferocious as Lonesome.  Griffith like you've never seen him.  Sure, the voice sounds like the beloved Andy Taylor, Matlock, and all the other small town beloveds he's played, but the words are like daggers, the intensity is close to Brando in STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. Rhodes is also a habitual womanizer, as faithless as they come, though he may actually love the one who created him, the woman who may perhaps have to erase a mistake.   He and the movie somehow never spin out of control.  A FACE IN THE CROWD is far from subtle, at times a bit didactic and too obvious (note the late elevator scene), but is positively jaw dropping to watch.  Sometimes points are best made with a sledgehammer.  And an acoustic guitar, son.