In his career, Andy Griffith was best known for playing likable characters who are either dimwitted (No Time for Sergeants) or are smarter than they appear (The Andy Griffith Show, Matlock). That likability first came through in his time as a stand-up comedian and in routines such as “What it Was, Was Football”. So it was quite a leap for him to take for his first lead role in movies the character of Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd, written by Budd Schulberg (adapting his short story “Your Arkansas Traveler”), but the result is a terrific film.
When we first meet Lonesome, he’s in an Arkansas jail for being drunk and disorderly. That’s where he first meets Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal), a radio journalist for the show “A Face in the Crowd”. Marcia is there to find someone to put on the program, and she’s charmed by Lonesome (she’s the one who gives Larry that nickname), especially when he starts singing “Free Man in the Morning” (which he claims he made up; Schulberg wrote the lyrics while Tom Glazer wrote the music for this and other songs that appeared in the movie). Not only does Lonesome get out of jail, he also gets a spot on the show, where audiences are charmed not only by his singing, but the way he seems to empathize with his listeners (he brings up the fact housewives are under-appreciated) and the irreverent attitude he displays towards authority figures (sending people to swim in the sheriff’s pool). Soon after, Lonesome gets recruited to appear on a TV show, despite his irreverent attitude towards sponsors as well (he makes sarcastic remarks about the mattress company sponsoring his radio spot, which causes them to want to dump him, until angry customers burn their mattresses). Once the TV show takes off, Joey De Palma (Anthony Franciosa), the assistant to the owner of the mattress company, offers to be Lonesome’s agent and gets him national exposure with a TV show in New York. Lonesome also becomes a spokesperson for Vitajex, the energy company sponsoring the show, and he’s recruited to help Senator Worthington Fuller (Marshall Neilan) in his political campaign. Through it all, Marcia remains by Lonesome’s side but starts to realize he’s become a monster.
We’ve all seen tales illustrating the old adage, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” – and the movie is also arguably a spin on Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein – but Kazan and Schulberg aren’t afraid to play around with things. They make it clear from the start Lonesome is full of contradictory impulses. On the one hand, he’s shrewder than people give him credit for at first (when he and Marcia first get the call about the TV show, he offers to appear on the show for nothing for two weeks, but if they want to keep him, he demands double the salary they initially offered him) and he certainly has his kind side (in addition to making sure Marcia comes along with him to the TV show, in his first appearance on the show, he brings an African-American woman on whose house had burned down and appeals to the audience to send her and her family money – this impresses Mel Miller (Walter Matthau), who’s assigned to write for Lonesome, at first). It’s also true Lonesome gets treated like a hick by his bosses at first (in that same initial appearance on the show, the cameraman sticks a sprig of grass in Lonesome’s mouth, until Lonesome spits it out). On the other hand, when Lonesome and Marcia leave Arkansas to appear on the TV show, Lonesome makes a remark about how he’s glad to leave everyone behind, and talks about them in disparaging terms, until he sees the look on Marcia’s face and claims he was only kidding. When Marcia ends up falling in love with Lonesome, she thinks they’re going to get married, until the real Mrs. Rhodes (Kay Medford) shows up and demands money. When Lonesome promises Marcia he’ll get divorced in Mexico so he’ll be free, he does – only to come back married to Betty Lou Fleckum (Lee Remick), a champion baton twirler. And all of this is before Lonesome gets involved with Vitajex and Senator Fuller.
Rhodes was partially inspired by Arthur Godfrey, a popular radio and television entertainer (The Great Man, which Jose Ferrer, directed, co-wrote, and starred in, was also inspired by Godfrey) who was beloved by his audiences, and, to be sure, progressive for his time (when Southern affiliate stations refused to carry his show until he got rid of his barbershop quartet because it had two African-Americans in it, Godfrey told them where to stick it), but whom apparently was not the best person to work for (his downfall came after he fired Julius La Rosa, a popular cast member on his show, for missing a dance lesson even though La Rosa stated he had a family emergency to deal with). Schulberg also added elements of Will Rogers (another entertainer who, according to Schulberg, projected a warm image at odds with his real personality), Tennessee Ernie Ford (the song “16 Tons”), televangelist Billy Graham, and former governor Huey Long. Kazan and Schulberg also seem to be making a counterpoint to Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe, which is also about a woman in media (though here, it’s a newspaper reporter) who discovers someone who becomes a media sensation. Of course, there are clear differences between the two movies, not least of which is “John Doe” (Gary Cooper) in Capra’s movie doesn’t let his power corrupt him, as he believes more in the words that he’s saying, and rebels when he realizes he’s serving someone who wants to use the “John Doe” movement for their own nefarious ends, whereas Lonesome, if he ever had such scruples, loses them pretty quickly.
Kazan, of course, is as much remembered today for the fact he not only named names of suspected Communists for the House Un-American Activities Committee, but also took out a full-page ad in The New York Times defending his decision, as for his work. Whatever you may make of what he did,* Kazan still seemed committed to taking on the power structure of the time and the danger it represented. Part of that comes in the fact he and cinematographers Gayne Rescher and Harry Stradling shot the entire movie on location, both in Arkansas and New York City. Kazan also cast locals in both places, which, in Arkansas, included African-Americans (albeit in small roles), as well as famous media personalities as themselves (including Burl Ives, Mike Wallace, and Walter Winchell), and shows the contrast between the lives of both places, though Kazan and Schulberg don’t make things simplistic. For example, though Mel may talk like an New York liberal (and Lonesome initially derides him from that), he’s from the South, having attended Vanderbilt in Tennessee (though Matthau was born and bred in New York City, he does a passable Southern accent), and while Senator Fuller is from the “liberal” state of California, his message is the Republican one of small government (he believes Social Security coddles Americans rather than help them) and “values” (on one broadcast, Lonesome echoes the senator’s message that, “The family that prays together, stays together”), and part of what makes Marcia so revulsed by Lonesome as the movie goes on is how he leans into that message. Kazan and his cinematographers also highlight this at the end, when they shoot Lonesome (thoroughly deranged after, unbeknownst to him, Marcia allowed his off-air remarks deriding his audience to go out for the entire audience to hear) on the balcony of his apartment in what has been sometimes referred to as a “Hitler-cam” shot, which is a familiar device, but works effectively here.
Another person behind the scenes who deserves a lot of credit here is costume designer Anna Hill Johnstone, particularly in how she dresses Marcia. When we first see Marcia, she’s wearing appropriate attire for a radio station in the hot South – a simple, loose-fitting white dress and a white hat to match, which also matches how her personality at the time is loose and easy-going. As the movie progresses, however, Johnstone puts Marcia in more tight-fitting clothing, showing how Marcia is getting beaten down personally and professionally by working for Lonesome, and in the last act, Marcia’s dressed in all black, including a black hat, as if she were in mourning clothes. Glazer, who wrote the score as well as the music for the songs (not just “Free Man in the Morning”, but also “Mama Guitar” and the jingle for Vitajex) also deserves credit for keeping the tone of the movie just right. Paul and Richard Sylbert should be mentioned for their art direction for the TV studio and sets, as they all reach the authenticity Kazan was striving for.
Of course, the performances also make this movie work so well. Franciosa, who turned down a potentially higher-paying role because he wanted to work with Kazan, is effective at conveying both De Palma’s charm and the snake-like cunning underneath. This was Remick’s first role, but you wouldn’t know it from the poise she shows throughout her time on screen, even when Lonesome discovers De Palma and Betty Lou have been having an affair. Mel was invented for the movie, and Schulberg wanted him to seem annoying, but Matthau keeps him from being one-note, and handles Mel’s speeches well, especially at the end, when he delivers a blistering prediction of what Lonesome’s career will look like after his fall. But the movie rests on Neal and Griffith, and they deliver. At the time, while Neal had appeared in high-profile films such as The Fountainhead, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and The Breaking Point (the latter of which is a closer adaptation of Hemingway’s novel To Have and Have Not than Howard Hawks’ 1944 film version), she was best known for her affair with Gary Cooper (her co-star in The Fountainhead), and had not worked for four years because of that affair, until this role. Though she may have felt she had something to prove, Neal effortlessly takes us through Marcia’s emotional journey, and for all the big emotional scenes she has (as when she cries and yells at Lonesome on the phone to get out of her life near the end), Neal also is able to communicate with just her facial expressions, such as the look of horror she gets on her face when Lonesome brags about how much influence he has. As for Griffith, as I mentioned before, he was known for his affability, and while diving into the dark side underneath that nature while playing Lonesome disturbed him enough that he avoided playing villainous or unlikable characters for several years (Kazan has said he had to get Griffith drunk to get him to be convincing for the climax), Griffith nonetheless conveys that dark side quite well. Given how television has allowed for personalities like Lonesome to prosper, A Face in the Crowd remains disturbingly relevant today.
*-For the record, while I understand Kazan’s feeling he needed to testify in order to keep his livelihood, the fact is, none of the people named by him or others were working to overthrow the government, they had a right to their beliefs just like he did, and while it’s true Communism as practiced in the Soviet Union, its bloc countries, and China was another form of totalitarianism, what Kazan wrote in that ad was self-righteous.
