A Face in the Crowd (1957)
(On Cable TV, November 2019) The more I dig into 1950s cinema, the more I realize that there was much more to the decade than the epic movies and MGM musicals that often pop up as representative of the time. It’s possible to assemble a very nice corpus of audacious satires and warnings about the nascent medium of television, not merely as a competitor to cinema but also as a force affecting civil society (paralleling 2010s concerns about social media). In 1957 alone, you can take a look at Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? for a comic take, Sweet Smell of Success for a darker tale of runaway media personalities, or to A Face in the Crowd for a full-bore dystopian vision of a demagogue made unstoppable by the power of media. As amazing as it can seem from 2019’s realization that there’s a significant portion of the American populace that will embrace a tinpot authoritarian for comfort, there’s long been a streak of Hollywood movies warning against the dangers of fascism, and A Face in the Crowd turns out to be a character study of what happens when someone with mean authoritarian instincts can put up a false populist front. Andy Griffith (of all people!) turns in a dark and memorable performance as “Lonesome Rhoades,” a folksy guitar player who is discovered by a radio journalist and takes to radio like a natural. Before long, his folksy manners and willingness to say things that people want to hear propel him to greater and greater success, all the way to a national TV show from New York. But Rhoades is not the person he broadcasts himself to be: egomaniac, womanizer, abuser, he becomes all too aware of his own power and plans for much, much bigger. As the radio journalist contemplates the monster she has created, the question becomes: Can he be stopped? Griffith is wonderfully evil here, as Patricia Neal plays the conscience of the film and Walter Matthau plays a terrific part as a highly cynical writer. (His verbal takedown of Rhoades at the very end of the film is an exceptionally efficient piece of writing allowing the story to end in mid-flight yet reassure us that it’s over.) As a piece of entertainment, A Face in the Crowd touches upon dark topics with success. But it’s as a media critique that the film becomes more and more relevant each year—the medium may change, but people like Rhoades are adept at exploiting them and had more people heeded the film, the American political leadership may not be in such a sorry state at the moment. I’m not sure that A Face in the Crowd can be called a hidden classic as it regularly gets unearthed and highlighted as being worthy of modern attention—but it’s a great movie and it shows us modern viewers that the 1950s weren’t necessarily the quaint quiet calm period often portrayed to be.