When most people today think of actor Andy Griffith, they probably think of either Sheriff Andy Taylor from The Andy Griffith Show or maybe the heroic attorney Ben Mattlock. Basically, he played good guys, and that’s the image he generally gave off. However, before he did nay of that stuff, he made a rather striking appearance as a more villainous character in director Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd.
Kazan’s work is generally a bit darker than anything Sheriff Andy ever had to deal with, so what sort of character could Griffith possibly be playing here?
Griffith here plays Larry “Lonesome’ Rhodes. Discovered sitting in a small town jail, Rhodes was something of a singer with a bit of good ol’ boy charm. Radio journalist Marcia (Patricia Neal) found him and decided he had something to him, inviting him to come to the station and play some songs and basically be himself. Marcia just feels Rhodes could be a big thing, and she isn’t wrong. His career takes off, going from small town radio to big time television, even finding himself brought in to help a politically conservative millionaire get an equally conservative United States Senator elected to the White House. Rhodes just understands how TV works, how his audience of rural folks and blue collar workers think, and he’ll charge top dollar to help someone get that audience’s attention, even creating a political talk show designed to look like Rhodes and a couple friends sitting around a general store and talking about the need for the government to cut out Social Security and unemployment because people really need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
See, Rhodes is just so darn charming. A talented singer with a demeanor on the TV that makes him seem like a common man, even as he hobnobs with the wealthy elites of the country to hawk various products and policies. He’s a first class gaslighter, talking marriage to the smitten Marcia even as he has younger girls over at his hotel room before marrying suddenly to a young drum majorette who demonstrates some real flexibility at a talent show–this movie sure does have a lot of suggested sex going on–all while cynical writer Mel (Walter Matthau) just waits off to the side for Rhodes to screw up and fall from grace. Mel, you see, has basically seen it all before, and he does believe that eventually, people will wise up to an obvious charlatan.
Man, this one was good. Griffith is such an oily persona on the screen, on the one hand, easy to see why people are going for his shtick, but on the other, clearly not that authentic. That probably comes from the simple fact the movie’s audience can clearly see what Rhodes is doing in private, even the few things that don’t go his way–he’s not the top of the totem pole so much as someone climbing there–but it says something about how TV might not be the best way to judge a person, the nature of a carefully crafted public persona, and the hope that people will eventually wise up, only (the film implies) for someone else to come along and start the whole thing up all over again.
Kazan’s own life was incredibly controversial on its own, but I think it says something that a character like Rhodes, a man obsessed with money, ratings, and his own popularity while not really believing in anything and swapping out the women in his life for increasingly younger girls, must seem very familiar to a lot of people even today. Even the most “honest” politicians and celebrities put on a public face to win themselves votes or attention, but we would hope that most of them are at least close to how they appear when they’re out and about. If nothing else, we may need to question the motives of why people do as they do, such that when the movie ends and Rhodes is ranting to an empty room, the sounds of canned applause coming from a sound machine, even with Mel’s promise that Rhodes will never entirely go away even if he’s a lot smaller publicly than he used to be, that when real life wannabe demogogues rise up that enough people will see through them to make their reins as short as possible.
Grade: A
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