In The Time, Prime Time, Of The T.V. Huckster-Elia Kazan’s A Face In The Crowd

DVD Review



By Sam Lowell



A Face In The Crowd, starring Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, directed by Elia Kazan (yeah, the guy who back in the Red Scare Cold War 1950s night ratted out everybody he could to save his own neck and has rightly been, whatever his considerable cinematic talents, treated like a pariah and should be every time who was who among the Hollywood red scare rat snitch fraternity comes up), 1957



Any who thinks that the current war-circus of hucksterism in politics, advertising, hell, just in interpersonal social network communications  started this year or last should take a serious cinematic look at the granddaddy of critiques of modern media, Elia Kazan’s A Face In The Crowd  to see that is simply not true. (I have already made my point about Mister Kazan’s lack of spine when the deal went down about his role as snitch during the red scare Cold War night acre elsewhere so this review is about the considerable artistic creative aspects of his career of which this film is something of a defining masterpiece.) The power of in its time, radio, television and now the Internet to form opinion, to push somebody’s agenda, to get people to buy something from candidates for office to sunglasses and laundry detergent gets a full workout here in the “golden age” of black and white television, the medium many of us older reviewers cut our teeth on.      



Here’s the beauty of this one as a cinematic statement in contrast to say the whiplash rise of a Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men or the film Network which also dealt with the power of mass communications to shape everyday life and to throw up characters who were willing to grab the brass ring when it was thrown at them. There is always something to being in the right place when that ring is thrown and that was the case of the central character known to his public as Lonesome Rhodes, played by Andy Griffith in a memorable performance and far removed from his silly role as the high sheriff of Mayberry. Old Lonesome was nothing but a good old boy grifter, a rolling stone, a ne’er do well sitting in some Podunk Arkansas jail for drunkenness and vagrancy when Marsha, played by Patricia Neal, the daughter of a local radio station owner who was trying to spice up the station’s programing with some authentic Americana and thought the local jail might produce some colorful characters.       

And that was the start of the Lonesome Rhodes trip to heaven, to the top of the ratings in both radio and television in succession. Old Lonesome had that something that the average listener could relate to in his faux homespun manner and that ability carried him to the top in short order. He could have cared less about playing high-brow to the elites or to use the mass media to educate. His genius lay in being a born hustler, a hustler of whatever had to be hustled. What Lonesome knew as he rose up the food chain was that all he had to figure out was what would sell to the rubes out there who wanted, well, wanted something, wanted entertainment anyway. He gave them that with a combination of folksy bologna, a cracker barrel general store style and a bit of strumming on the guitar. Yeah, as he said in a moment of candor at the end, the end of his run he had them eating out of his hand.    

Needless to say a high-brow film based totally on a huckster’s rise and all would be a flop if there wasn’t a counterbalance, wasn’t somebody to rein in old Lonesome’s excesses. Tone him down a little, give him some semblance of style. That, of course, was woven into the film by the tensions between Lonesome and Marsha over his future, especially when he later began to believe half the stuff that was being said about him. Began to get too big for his britches. That match-up also produced the serious love interest, mostly on Marsha’s side, but at key points his as well, that created as much chaos in their lives as any sense of gaining happiness from Lonesome’s success.

Something would have to give and it eventually did when after hustling pills for a right-wing ex-general’s Big Pharma company Lonesome began to keep some pretty unsavory political company (although not maybe so unsavory in the 1950s when the post-World War II red scare and “golden age of the American way” created by a big stretch of prosperity which belonged to the victors in that war produced a lot of characters ready to ditch the gains of the New and Fair Deals). Poor old Lonesome began got so hopped up on his success that he began to think that he could sell lackluster political candidates to the public, his average American public ready to jump at anything he had to say, just like selling high energy pills.

Here’s the funny part as his audience grew he became more contemptuous of the hand that feed him. That con man’s contempt along with treating Marsha lie a dishrag at the wrong times, like the time when he said he would marry her and then went and grabbed a teenage bride would lead to his undoing.  Between the woman scorned and her felt need to curb Lonesome’s excesses Marsha pulled the plug, brought him down in the long gone age of live television the easiest way possible. Let the home audience hear what he really thought of them once the sound was supposed to be off after the show was over. Yeah she pulled the switch and he was broken, utterly broken, thereafter.                

I wonder though whether today old Lonesome in the age of “realty television” and “in your face” characters who have become celebrities based exclusively on applying that skill set wasn’t just a man before his time, and that despite the contrived ending in this film he would have kept a great part of his audience. Think about that possibility and watch this classic from the “golden age” of black and white film.