Elia Kazan (1957)
Soon after On the Waterfront, Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg joined forces again on A Face in the Crowd. The film is, broadly speaking, a satire. Its targets include television, advertising, politics and the synergies between them. Although celebrity culture is an important part of the mix, A Face in the Crowd virtually exempts the worlds of film-making and theatre – Kazan’s chosen milieus – from its hit list. And while Schulberg had written TV drama, this isn’t the kind of television that exercises him and Kazan. Their subject is, rather, as Kazan told Michel Ciment, sixteen years after the film’s release: ‘… the danger of power in the television medium … the fact that power corrupts people … the fact that power is [through television] attainable in a new way that makes it especially dangerous’[1].
A Face in the Crowd’s medium for delivery of its warning is Larry Rhodes (Andy Griffith), a boozy Arkansan drifter who becomes a star. Radio journalist Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal) does a show called ‘A Face in the Crowd’, based on vox pop interviews with local people in a variety of settings. At the start of the film, she arrives at a jail in rural Arkansas to record the latest edition of her programme. Rhodes has spent a night in the cells for being drunk and disorderly. Marcia learns that he sings and plays the guitar; she encourages him to do a number for the radio audience. At first, he’s reluctant even to give his forename, so Marcia punningly dubs him ‘Lonesome’ Rhodes. But he does agree to sing; his distinctive voice and humour are an instant hit; and Marcia, whose uncle owns the radio station, gets Lonesome his own show. It’s not long before he makes the transition from radio to television, from backwoods Arkansas – via Memphis – to New York City. En route, he makes irreverent fun of his shows’ sponsors at the same time as doing wonders for the sales of their products. Lonesome becomes so popular – and so renowned for knowing what his audience wants and getting through to them – that he’s enlisted to help breathe life into the Presidential campaign of stuffy, uncharismatic Senator Worthington Fuller (Marshall Neilan).
Lonesome Rhodes uses his TV show as a populist soapbox. The Senator’s people are so keen to stay on the right side of him that there’s talk of a cabinet post in the event that Fuller is elected. Lonesome eventually suffers an instant, spectacular fall from grace. Marcia, who was in love with him but now deeply regrets setting this ‘demagogue in denims’ on the road to fame and fortune, activates a live microphone as the closing credits roll on Lonesome’s TV show. Thinking he’s off air, he says just what he thinks of his viewers:
‘You know what the public’s like? A cage full of guinea pigs. Good night, you stupid idiots. Good night, you miserable slobs. They’re a lot of trained seals. I toss them a dead fish and they’ll flap their flippers.’
2020 vision makes this storyline look almost timid. Schulberg and Kazan don’t suggest that a blowhard TV personality might himself become a Presidential candidate – and suffer no loss of popularity through the public release of a tape-recording of his boastful misogyny. A piece of sixty-year-old jeremiad fiction is eclipsed by present-day media and political reality, by the noxious brand that actually occupies the Oval Office.
Despite a message that now seems tame, A Face in the Crowd is decidedly over the top in terms of style. Kazan’s almost documentary descriptions of small-town life – in the opening shots of the jail’s environs, at the state drum-majorette competition – are good but only occasional. The increasingly strident lampoon overwhelms them. The effectiveness of Kazan’s penchant for melodrama generally depends on the substance of his material: it fortifies already strong stories like On the Waterfront and East of Eden, overpowers weaker pieces like Splendor in the Grass. In A Face in the Crowd, Kazan applies the same potentially sledgehammer touch to shallow satire and the result is hysterical.
Andy Griffith, in his feature film debut, works and shouts formidably hard but I missed what Marcia found attractive about Lonesome even before he becomes a dangerous egomaniac. A few of Patricia Neal’s quietly regretful moments register but the role is impossible – along with the costumes. Once Marcia is disillusioned, Anna Hill Johnstone dresses her in black, as if Marcia, like Masha in The Seagull, is in mourning for her life. Hoping to be Lonesome’s wife, Marcia is doubly deceived by him – first, when a woman he’s still married to (Kay Medford) turns up with a blackmail threat, then when Lonesome is instantly smitten with baton-twirling teenager Betty Lou Fleckum (Lee Remick), whom he beds and bigamously weds. A Face in the Crowd was Remick’s Hollywood debut too and it’s no wonder she made an impression. Although Kazan overdoes the eye contact between Betty Lou and Lonesome as he judges the drum majorette contest, Lee Remick is an extraordinary image of radiant impudence.
Anthony Franciosa plays Joey De Palma, a shrewdly self-serving marketing man. Walter Matthau is Mel Miller, a wily TV show insider. Both are impressive, at least until what are conceived as their big moments – for Franciosa a yelling showdown with Andy Griffith, for Matthau an attack of wordy moralising. As might be expected, the script includes plenty of speeches. Lonesome’s hick sidekick Beanie (Rod Brasfield), who is loyal to Lonesome and serves to remind the anti-hero of his humble beginnings, is one of the few significant characters to get away without saying too much. In spite of all the verbiage, the film never clarifies whether Lonesome is congenitally a wrong ‘un or himself the victim of the system he’s caught up in. There’s no sympathy shown towards him, even though he didn’t ask to be famous in the first place. Inflated with crowd scenes and repetitious illustrations of the pernicious inanity of its bêtes noires, this picture is nearly twenty minutes longer than On the Waterfront – though you leave the cinema incredulous that it can be. In spite of its bombast, A Face in the Crowd is small fry beside Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan’s previous collaboration.
21 February 2020
[1] Kazan on Kazan (Secker & Warburg, 1973)
