GOTTA SEE IT # 7 - "A FACE IN THE CROWD"

“A FACE IN THE CROWD”

Starring: Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, Anthony Franciosa, Walter Matthau, Lee Remick, Percy Waram, Paul McGrath, Rod Brasfield, Marshall Neilan.
Written by: Budd Schulberg
Directed by: Elia Kazan
B & W – 1957
125 mins.
U.S.A.

We’re not in Mayberry – at least not yet. This late fifties stunner slid into theatres a few years before Andy Griffith starred in the good natured sitcom for which he’d become best known. If you’re only familiar with him from that or “Matlock”, well, you might just blow a fuse or two watching him bark and bully his way through two hours of film as a cunning hick who plays people with as much ease as he does his ever-present acoustic guitar.

Patricia Neal is the sturdy good girl Marcia Jefferies - a bright and adventurous radio show host who travels the country looking for new talent. She finds that and a whole bunch more when she visits an Arkansas jail where she encounters hick huckster extraordinaire Larry Rhodes. She christens him “Lonesome” and he sweeps her and the country off their feet with his potent mix of hillbilly bravado and wild eyed charisma on his way to becoming a regional radio superstar and, later, a national TV sensation.

Now, this was directed by Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront, East of Eden) who, to say the least, knew a thing or two about actors. Here, though, he outdoes himself by getting Griffith to crawl into every dirt corner of his being and dig out a performance all muddied with rage and wild desperation. Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes is one twisted mess of a maze of a man. He’s part boy-part man, part angel-part devil. He’s more real and alive than anyone you’ll ever meet. He’s also more fake and dead.

Schulberg (The Harder They Fall) and Kazan have created something complex and magnificent here - partly the chronicle of the unraveling of a megalomaniac, partly an undressing of a brand new mass medium and fully the skewering of a gullible public starting with none other than ambitious and love struck Marcia Jefferies. She’s a sort of a Dr. Frankenstein here. No, though she named him, she didn’t create Rhodes, but she certainly did let him loose on an unsuspecting public. He was a predator and she showed him to his prey. Heck, though she didn’t know it, she was his prey.

The film also works as a clever tale of country vs. city and intuitive vs. intellectual. Though bright and well educated, Marcia is no match for Rhodes. When we first meet him - asleep on a jail cell floor, looking spent and soul sick, ready to throttle the next person who so much as whistles his way - “Lonesome” already knows more about how people are hooked up than any human should. He’s bright and knowing in ways that Marcia and her pal Mell Miller (played with appropriate mild mannered dullness by Walter Matthau) cannot even conceive of, let alone comprehend.

There’s a startling scene, at a train station, fairly early in the film, where a crowded mass of Arkansas folk have gathered to see their hometown hero “Lonesome” off as he heads to Memphis to star in his very own big time TV show. It’s nighttime and the train is pulling away from the station. The folks are waving and cheering and “Lonesome” is hanging off the train, smiling and waving back at them. Then, the folks run out and so to does the smile on Rhodes’ face, as he rolls into the night and stares, sad faced, into the endless, empty dark. That brief, yet memorable moment, hints at the saddest of all truths about Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes – he was the first and he’ll be the last casualty of his own cruel con.