Last night I finally got around to watching Elia Kazan's 1957 film A Face in the Crowd. The poor Netflix DVD had lain around the house all summer, ignored night after night, until it was buried under a stack of children's cartoons and bootleg episodes of Dr. Who. As has become the constant refrain of my life--I should not have waited so long.
Based on a short story by by Budd Schulberg, A Face in the Crowd tells of the rise and fall of a homespun hillbilly, played by Andy Griffith. The story was inspired by the careers of men like Will Rogers and Arthur Godfrey1, men whose genial humor masked their desire and ability to influence the nation's politics. A Face in the Crowd is one of many texts at the time which examined the growing influence of the media—The Great Man (1956) and The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) being two others. It was not seen at the time as a particularly good film—reviews were decidedly mixed, and box office receipts anemic. But in the mid-70s, amid the nation's reaction to Nixon and Watergate, the film began to be seen in a more positive light. The critical success of Network was seen in part as a continuation of the ideas begun in Kazan's film. Moreover, with the election of actor Ronald Reagan in 1980, the film took hold, at least for liberals, as an eerily prescient warning about the dangers of media manipulation and the public's desire for politicians that portray a faux-rural charm.
And believe you me, Griffith is charming. I had never seen Griffith act, having assiduously avoided his eponymous TV show. I've seen clips, of course, which only reinforced my impression of him as a dumbed down Atticus Finch, a soothingly bland father figure and all around nice guy who plays straight man to the wackiness of small-town life and teaches us valuable lessons. In short, I was completely unprepared for his performance in A Face in the Crowd. Griffith is simultaneously attractive and repulsive. Especially in the first third of the film, I found myself laughing out loud at his antics, fully aware that he is a manipulative, completely self-centered bastard. Schickel calls Griffith's portrayal of Lonesome Rhodes the most “nakedly poised on this fine line” between attraction and repulsion of all of Kazan's protagonists, and I agree with him. Not even Brando as Stanley Kowalski is better, simply because Brando isn't able to repulse us as Griffith can.2 I wasn't as enamored with Patricia Neal's character, the woman who discovers, beds, and eventually betrays Rhodes. But next to Griffith's scenery-chewing, her more restrained performance is harder to remember. Some have criticized her long-suffering character for, well, suffering so long. She does put up with quite a bit, but having seen enough Kazan work, I accept that she is just like all his other heroines—an upper-class educated woman irresistibly drawn to the animal magnetism of a sweaty working class man. Neal is superb at reaction shots; which is good, because Kazan uses a lot of them. There are plenty of moments where we see Griffith chewing some scenery while over his shoulder we see Neal's reaction—a perfect mix of attraction and repulsion. Kazan might have cast her for that look alone.
The “social menace of television” theme is well done, but at this point, nothing new. (Though there is a wonderfully surreal montage of advertising for the film's main product, a patent medicine sham that is marketed as a 50s version of Viagra, that skewers the sexism of the day.) In fact, Rhodes's quick fall from grace (fantastically if melodramatically conveyed by the close-up on the elevator buttons lighting up in succession as Rhodes descends after his TV gaffe) strikes me as a bit naïve. These days, right-wing entertainers can say just about anything and not only survive, but thrive. We do love our bad boys. And that is the aspect of the film that I found most provocative—the critique of our love of rebellion. Lonesome Rhodes is first shown to us in prison, and his rise in popularity is directly related to his bad boy behavior—he tells his radio listeners to use his boss's swimming pool, and refuses to read the advertising copy given him, mocking his sponsors instead. This mockery, of course, only increases sales. Rhodes is pure id, thinking only of himself and his pleasures, yet somehow is able to make others feel intense connections to him. Kazan had, of course, worked with both of the poster boys for Teenage Angst, Marlon Brando and James Dean, and with this film he seems to deconstruct the trope. At the beginning of the film Rhodes sings of freedom, a song that he returns to throughout the film, a song that highlights how we translate his acts of petulance and narcissism as expressions of the male American Dream, the dream of having complete control over your own life, of telling the boss to shove it, of sleeping with whomever, whenever you choose. By the end of the film this dream has become a nightmare, with Rhodes revealed as the monster he was all along. (The final time we see Rhodes, he is ranting maniacally to an empty room, as his one remaining lackey plays canned applause, reminding us of the simulacrum that he, and all Bad Boys, have always represented. Yes, he is utterly self-absorbed—as are we, for wanting his selfishness to mean something that it never can.)
If the film has a hero, it is nebbish Walter Matthau, the third spoke of the film's love triangle.3 Poor intellectual, glasses-wearing, pushover Matthau—pining away for the girl who is always attracted to the bad boy instead. Yet it is Matthau who gets to deliver the film's final denunciation of Rhodes, and he also gets the girl—though we are led to believe that she will always be pining after Andy Griffith. More importantly, Matthau's character learns from and profits from his experience—he has written a tell-all book about Rhodes, set to be released just as Rhodes spectacularly implodes. Though the film denounces the media in no uncertain terms, A Face in the Crowd is no Frankfurt School manifesto. It is not capitalism that is to blame; rather, it is us poor rubes, who fail to see through the chicanery. In such a world, the true heroes are those who pull back the curtain and reveal the Truth. And if they can profit while doing so, more power to them.
1This info is drawn from Richard Schickel's 2005 biography of Elia Kazan, which I purchased at Half-price Books for a dollar, and which has sat unread on my shelf ever since. I was aware of Will Rogers, but had never heard of Godfrey. After reading Wikipedia, I see how much of the film is based on Godfrey. I wonder if Jack Kirby modelled Glorious Godfrey on him? Red hair, power of persuasion—it must be.
2 Interestingly, the critics of the time faulted Griffith for exactly this dual quality of his performance, wanting him “to be either a snake or a charmer” in Schickel's words.
3God how I love this type of character. Screenwriters obviously overidentify with the Clark Kent type—as do I.
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