A Face in the Crowd
Grade: 75
Before Andy Griffith hit the goldmine with a long-running weekly television series, he made two very good films in the late 1950s, "A Face in the Crowd" and "No Time for Sergeants". The two films presented very different Griffiths. While he begins as a down-home Southerner in both, in "A Face in the Crowd" he becomes a power-mad manipulator, while in "No Time for Sergeants" he never strays from his Gomer Pyle imitation. Guess which film had greater commercial success...
Griffith, in his film debut, plays "Lonesome" Rhodes, a talented entertainer discovered by Patricia Neal in a podunk Arkansas jail. Rhodes gets a local radio show where his mesmerizing home-spun philosophizing and charm makes him a celebrity. Soon he graduates to a Memphis television show, then a national show in New York. Rhodes is all too aware of his power over his audience, and becomes a monster, hungry for political power and contemptuous of his followers.
Lee Remick makes her screen debut as Rhodes' young wife, while Walter Matthau is his world-weary writer. Anthony Franciosa is Rhodes' cynical, on-the-move agent.
"A Face in the Crowd" received no Academy Award nominations and stiffed at the box office, despite its quality and the presence of Elia Kazan as director and Budd Schulberg as writer (they had collaborated on "On the Waterfront"). Perhaps the public wasn't ready for the film's indictment of television and its ability to manipulate the masses with phony images.
The weakest part of "A Face in the Crowd" may be the ending, in which good (naturally) triumphs over evil. Milquetoast Matthau delivers a speech to Griffith like a judge passing a sentence, while Griffith goes half-mad upon his come-uppance.
But still, "A Face in the Crowd", if anything, is more relevant today than during its own era. Both Reagan and Clinton have demonstrated that national electoral appeal comes from images more than substance.
kollers@mpsi.net http://members.tripod.com/~Brian_Koller/movies.html
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