Review of A Face in the Crowd (1957) by Paul Z — 12 Nov 2010

I've seen so much of Andry Griffith sidelong throughout my life having been brought up by parents devoted to his TV work, comic and dramatic, but never was I close to as aware of his powerful talents as now upon seeing this endlessly perceptive film. What's more, you're too busy enjoying the presence of Patricia Neal, Walter Matthau, Tony Franciosa and the sumptuous Lee Remick to realize the bald lack of transatlantic affectation or studio-era artifice in their performances. But at any rate, it's been half a century since A Face in the Crowd released, however there's a significant way in which this 1957 Elia Kazan prophecy stays the dawning picture of the emphasis on the function of language, power relations, and motives. Election years make it just too obvious that our popular culture and electoral politics are reciprocal: A Face in the Crowd was the earliest to interpret it on film. This extraordinarily prophetic masterwork has its crucial scene in a luxurious private screening room. An assembly of financiers have congregated to watch a prospective president's newest routine. It sucks. The political podium has become "televisual," one commercial futurist asserts. "Instead of long-winded public debates, the people want capsule slogans: 'Time for a change!' 'The mess in Washington!' 'More bang for a buck!' Punch lines and glamour!" Or government via sound bite and photo op. Shortly, a chillingly enthusiastic TV star named Lonesome Rhodes is enlisted to coach this timid politico how to earn a moniker, and kiss the babies, so to speak.

Lonesome Rhodes himself is found in an Arkansas county jail by a regional radio reporter. He adorns her show with a spur-of-the-moment performance of Free Man in the Morning, and she succeeds in making him a regular. Therefore facilitated, Rhodes reveals the influence of the medium on the gullible, attentive listeners candidly and superseding in the life of the township. Soon, he's ranked from community radio to TV variety shows, first in Memphis and then New York.

Entertainer, platform, and---hence the title---part of the audience, Rhodes is a market survey of one, in addition to the characterization of TV and, before the movie ends, a big-time menace to American democracy. This pre-Network foretelling is, fundamentally, a "political horror film." It's not droll enough to function as satire, quite persistently literal for metaphor, yet too overstated to work as drama. Nor was it a sensation, a lack many of our most important films share. As political oratory, nevertheless, magnum opus of psychological realism has never stopped being significant. Warningly suggested during the 1960 campaign (determined, so people believed, by a televised debate), quasi-remade, re-released in 1972, cited to clarify Watergate in 1974, and reconfigured as Network in 1976.

Decades later, Kazan started saying that he and Schulberg had made a movie about Reagan back when Reagan was still shilling for GE. (Makes sense it was seldom run on TV until the 1990s.) No vast out-of-the-box thinking is needed to view Lee Atwater as Bush 41's Lonesome Rhodes or Ross Perot as a Rhodes knockoff, and merely a slight implication of sensationalist theatrics is required to see Hillary playing Patricia Neal to Bill's Andy Griffith, and contrariwise. Of late, A Face in the Crowd can appear to foreshadow the media-contrived candidacy and TV-groomed character of unsuccessful contender Senator Fred Thompson. Huckabee even more so. Both Bush Jr. and Sarah Palin's fastidiously counterfeit populist axioms evoke the Rhodes spirit, cheap, deceitful double-dealers who rose to power with a predetermined mass talking in a folksy down-home tongue. And of course, Glenn Beck wants us to think he's Howard Beale, but he is the contrary, he is more Lonesome Rhodes than any other shock-doctrine party-line pundit out there right now.

The reality is that this enormously entertaining work of booming vitality by an authority on a fresh breed of psychosomatic and personal conviction in acting is not about any single person so much as a specific coordination that organizes all, politics, news, entertainment in the democracy of the marketplace. The movie is even now dead on. With the right personality and implication, it could still happen. And it does. Pay attention to what they say! Don't be taken in by their charisma or faith-rousing celebrity! Don't accept the advertisement, see what's in the bag!