| A Face in the Crowd | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Elia Kazan |
| Produced by | Elia Kazan |
| Written by | Budd Schulberg; also story "Your Arkansas Traveler" |
| Starring | Andy Griffith Patricia Neal Anthony Franciosa Walter Matthau Lee Remick |
| Music by | Tom Glazer |
| Cinematography | Gayne Rescher Harry Stradling Sr. |
| Editing by | Gene Milford |
| Distributed by | Warner Bros. |
| Release date(s) | May 28, 1957 |
| Running time | 125 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
A Face in the Crowd is a 1957 film starring Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal and Walter Matthau, directed by Elia Kazan.[1][2] The screenplay was written by Budd Schulberg, based on his short story "Your Arkansas Traveler".
The story centers on a drifter named Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes (Griffith, in a role starkly different from the amiable "Sheriff Andy Taylor" persona), who is discovered by the producer (Neal) of a small-market radio program in rural northeast Arkansas. Rhodes ultimately rises to great fame and influence on national television.
The film launched Griffith into stardom, but earned mixed reviews upon its original release. Later decades have seen reappraisals of the movie, and in 2008 A Face in the Crowd was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
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In late 1950s America, a drunken drifter, Larry Rhodes (Andy Griffith), is plucked out of a rural Arkansas jail by Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal) to sing on a radio show at station KGRK. His raw voice, folksy humor and personal charm bring about a strong local following, and he lands a television show in Memphis, Tennessee under the stage name "Lonesome" Rhodes, given to him on a whim by Jeffries. With the support of the show's staff writer Mel Miller (Walter Matthau) and Jeffries, the charismatic Rhodes ad libs his way to Memphis area popularity. When he pokes fun at his sponsor, a mattress company, they fire him — but his adoring audience revolts, burning mattresses in the street. The sponsor discovers that Rhodes's irreverent pitches actually increased sales by 55%, and he is returned to the air with a new knowledge of his power of persuasion. Rhodes also begins an affair with Jeffries.
Meanwhile, an ambitious office worker at the mattress company, Joey DePalma (Anthony Franciosa), uses the firing episode, and subsequent popular protest that follows, to put together a deal for Rhodes to star in his own show in New York City. The sponsor of this show is Vitajex, an energy supplement which he ingeniously pitches as a Viagra-type yellow pill. Rhodes's fame, influence and ego balloon. Behind the scenes, he berates his staff and betrays Jeffries by eloping with a 17-year-old drum majorette (Lee Remick). The onetime drifter and his new bride move into a luxury penthouse, while a furious Jeffries demands more money for her role in Rhodes's success.
The sponsor's CEO introduces Rhodes to a senator whose presidential campaign is faltering. Under Rhodes's tutelage as media coach, the Senator gains the lead in national polls. But Rhodes's life begins to unravel as his amoral dealings with the people closest to him have placed his career trajectory on a collision course with their festering wounds. He goes home early to find his agent and young wife ending a tryst. He dumps his wife and flees to Marcia Jeffries to proclaim that with the election victory assured, he will soon serve on the cabinet as "Secretary For National Morale." Finally seeing Rhodes's narcissism, Jeffries runs from the room.
Miller tells Jeffries he's written an exposé about Rhodes, entitled, "Demagogue in Denim", and he has just found a publisher. Ultimately, Rhodes's descent into fame and arrogance begins to turn on him. Rhodes's teenaged wife cheats on him with DePalma who threatens to reveal Rhodes's own secrets if the affair is made public, claiming that he and Rhodes are now part of the same corruption. The final blow is delivered by the one who has loved Rhodes the most and been most injured by his selfishness: Marcia Jeffries. At the end of one of Rhodes's shows, the engineer cuts the microphone and leaves Jeffries alone in the control booth while the show's credits roll. Millions of viewers watch (in what initially is silence) their hero Rhodes smiling and seeming to chat amiably with the rest of the cast. In truth, he's on a vitriolic rant about the stupidity of his audience. In the broadcast booth, Jeffries reactivates his microphone, sending his words and laughter over the air live. A sequence of television viewers is shown to react to Rhodes's description of them all as "idiots, morons, and guinea pigs." Still unaware that his words have gone out over the air waves (with thousands of angry calls to local stations and the network headquarters), he departs the penthouse studio in a jovial mood and prophetically tells the elevator operator that he's going "all the way down."
Rhodes arrives at his penthouse, where he was to meet with the nation's business and political elite. Instead he finds an empty space, except for a group of African American butlers and servants, by whom, in desperation, he demands to be loved. When the butlers and servants don't respond to his demands, Rhodes dismisses all of them. When Rhodes calls Jeffries at the studio, she listens to Rhodes's voice, threatening to jump to his death from the penthouse. Jeffries, who has been silent for the phone call, suddenly screams at Rhodes, telling him to jump and to get out of hers and everybody's lives. She ends up sobbing, while Miller asks her angrily why did she not tell Rhodes the truth of her actions. Jeffries and Miller go to his apartment and find him in crisis, drunk, and disconnected from reality. He shouts folksy platitudes, and sings at the top of his lungs while his longtime flunky Beanie (Rod Brasfield) works an applause machine — Rhodes's own invention — to replace the cheers, applause, and laughter of the audience that has abandoned him. Marcia Jeffries admits it was she who betrayed him, and tells him to never call her ever again, and Miller tells Rhodes that life as he knew it is over.
But Miller observes and bemoans the fact that Rhodes is not really destroyed at all. Miller tells him that both the public’s, and the network’s need for Rhodes will, “after a decent interval” of remorse and public contrition, return him to the public eye; first locally (maybe only radio at first) and then, at some reduced level, nationally. The film ends with Rhodes yelling from the window of his penthouse for Marcia Jeffries as she leaves in a taxi with Miller; the final image is of a flashing neon Coca Cola sign and the busy streets below it, full of taxis.
Aspects of the Lonesome Rhodes character were likely inspired by 1940s and '50s CBS radio-TV star Arthur Godfrey. The scene where Rhodes, on TV in Memphis, spoofs his sponsor echoes Godfrey's reputation for kidding his own advertisers. Godfrey claimed he would not advertise products he did not believe in, and routinely ridiculed both the sponsors' stodgy ad copy and occasionally, the companies' executives. The more Godfrey did this, the more sales increased. Arthur Godfrey's immense popularity began to deflate following his 1953 on-air firing of singer Julius LaRosa, which opened the gradual exposure of his less lovable, often controlling off-camera personality. Though he remained on radio, TV and even films for several years afterward, Godfrey's mass appeal and popularity had passed its apex, and were never the same. At one point in the film, Rhodes telegraphs Jeffries that he's going to miss a broadcast and requests that Godfrey fill in for him. Some have suggested that the character may have been inspired in part by John Henry Faulk, a country comedian who was long blacklisted as a result of the "Red Scare," although Faulk was never really a national figure.
Screenwriter Schulberg himself claimed to have based a significant part of the character's facade on that of Will Rogers, adding a distinctively un-Rogers-like level of amorality and cruelty. In Richard Schickel's 2005 biography of director Elia Kazan, Schulberg explained that he had met Will Rogers, Jr. during the latter's run for Congress and discussed his famous father. The younger Rogers supposedly told Schulberg that his father socialized with the very establishment types he mocked in his public pronouncements, adding that his father was actually a political reactionary in private life.[3]
The film marked the debut of actress Lee Remick, who plays a teenage baton-twirling champion from Arkansas, one of Rhodes's love interests whom he marries instead of Marcia Jeffries. To underscore the sway of television media in America, Kazan cleverly incorporated several cameos by popular "talking heads", including: Sam Levenson, John Cameron Swayze, Mike Wallace, Earl Wilson, and Walter Winchell.
Two cast members had genuine ties to the country music field. Rod Brasfield was a popular Grand Ole Opry comedian in the 1950s, known for his own performances and onstage comic banter with legendary Opry comic Minnie Pearl. Big Jeff Bess, who portrayed the Sheriff, was a Nashville-based country music performer on radio station WLAC there, leading a group called "Big Jeff and His Radio Playboys," which recorded for Dot Records and included guitarist Grady Martin. Bess was, for a time, the husband of Tootsie Bess, longtime owner of Nashville's famous downtown bar Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, a hangout for country entertainers.
Upon its original release, A Face in the Crowd earned somewhat mixed reviews. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times gave the film a mixed review. Though he applauded Griffith's performance ("Mr. Griffith plays him with thunderous vigor..."[4]), at the same time, he felt that the character overpowered the rest of the cast and the story. "As a consequence, the dominance of the hero and his monstrous momentum ... eventually become a bit monotonous when they are not truly opposed."[4] Crowther found Rhodes "highly entertaining and well worth pondering when he is on the rise", but considered the ending "inane".[4]
Over the decades, however, critical opinion of the film has warmed considerably. As of mid-2011, A Face in the Crowd has a 91% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 23 reviews.[5]
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