A Face in the Crowd

A Face in the Crowd (1957) is an epic motion picture starring Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, and Walter Matthau, directed by Elia Kazan. The screenplay was written by Budd Schulberg, based on his own short story "The Arkansas Traveler". The story centers on a "country" comedian, a common thug named Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes (Griffith, in a role starkly different from the amiable "Sheriff Andy Taylor" persona), who is discovered by the hostess (Neal) of a small-market radio program in Piggott, Arkansas.

Plot

The setting for the film is late 1950s America, a time during which television was rapidly replacing radio as the most popular entertainment medium. Although Rhodes is coarse and abusive, he possesses a colloquial, on-air charm that quickly endears him to the hearts and minds of rural listeners after Marcia Jeffries (Neal), a small-town radio personality, discovers him in the Piggott, Arkansas jail and lands him radio show there. A talent scout invites him to appear on television in Memphis, Tennessee where Rhodes is introduced to Mel Miller (Matthau), a bookish Vanderbilt graduate who writes his scripts. However, Rhodes makes a name for himself by insulting his sponsor — to the delight of his adoring audience, a technique clearly inspired by Arthur Godfrey, who did much the same thing on air. While Rhodes's sponsor, a fictional mattress company, is offended, Godfrey's sponsors found their sales rose when the TV host kidded them on-air.

An opportunistic "office boy" (portrayed by Anthony Franciosa) lands Rhodes a contract in New York City, where he becomes the national TV spokesman for Vitajex, an innocuous dietary supplement. A frenetic montage of Rhode's hyperbolic ads for Vitajex is one of the film's most memorable sequences, revealing the gullibility of the American public to a persuasive con-artist. In this repect, the character of Lonesome Rhodes is a chilling precursor to the age of manipulative infomercials and televangelists. As Rhodes' popularity increases, bolstered by his own television variety show ("Lonesome Rhodes' Cracker Barrel"), he becomes a minion in the hands of right-wing, isolationist politicians. In the tradition of classical tragedy, Rhodes is undone by his thirst for power and by Jeffries who, despite building his stardom, becomes so fed up that she allows him to expose his contempt for his fans on the air.

Real-life inspirations

Musically, it's possible that Schulberg built the musical side of the Rhodes character on that of Tennessee Ernie Ford who, in the wake of his hit record "Sixteen Tons," had a popular weekly half-hour program on NBC. The down-home facade of Rhodes seems to have some roots in Ford's "Pea Picker" persona though Ford himself was nothing like the manipulative, megalomanaical Rhodes. Certain aspects of the Rhodes personality, however, presented in the film, were clearly inspired by 1950s CBS radio-TV star Arthur Godfrey. A scene where Rhodes, on TV in Memphis, spoofs his sponsor, a mattress manufacturer, echoes Godfrey's reputation for kidding his sponsors (who approved, since it only increased their sales) on the air. Godfrey, of course, underwent a slower drop from fame following his 1953 on-air firing of singer Julius LaRosa.

The film marked the debut of actress Lee Remick, who plays a teenage baton-twirling champion from Arkansas, one of Rhodes' love interests. To underscore the sway of television media in America, Kazan cleverly incorporated several cameos by popular "talking heads," including: Sam Levenson, John Cameron Swayze, Mike Wallace, Earl Wilson, and Walter Winchell.

Some have suggested that the Rhodes character may have been inspired in part by John Henry Faulk, a country comedian who was long blacklisted as a result of the "Red Scare". Schulberg, however, has admitted basing a significant part of the character's facade on that of Will Rogers, adding a distinctively un-Rogers like level of amorality and cruelty. Since Godfrey was involved in similar controversies based around the press seeing the difference between his amiable on-air personality and his cold, controlling offstage ferocity, many parallels were drawn between the two.