Film review

  • A Face in the Crowd

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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)

  • The Lighthouse

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robert Eggers (2019)

    I went to see Mati Diop’s Atlantics at Curzon Wimbledon in early December last year.  It was a late morning weekday show and I was the only person in the theatre.  A few minutes into the film, the screen went dark and stayed that way.  A pleasantly apologetic Curzon person explained that the problem was a fault with the cinema’s air-con system.  He didn’t expect normal service to be resumed any time soon and refunded me the cost of my ticket.  I realised that, if I got a move on, I could make it to the next show of Atlantics at Curzon Soho instead, and I headed there.  Now there were two other people in the audience.  (It’s true the film had just started streaming on Netflix at the time.  Even so.)

    I’d not been back to Curzon Soho since, until The Lighthouse.  Just as the trailers ended, the screen went dark – a power cut.  There was barely a minute to think about symmetrical coincidence before power was restored and it’s just as well there was no need to relocate this time.  As might be expected from the title, Robert Eggers’s second feature is, like Diop’s first, marine-themed.  Both include some apparently supernatural happenings although those in The Lighthouse are more easily explicable as the imaginings of a disturbed mind.  There the resemblances between the two films end.  They’re oceans apart in quality.

    It seems in box-office appeal too.  This show of The Lighthouse was on Thursday lunchtime, at the end of its third week in cinemas.  The audience must have numbered at least thirty, which may sound modest but, in my experience, is pretty good nowadays for a non-peak show in central London during the working week.  As I watched the film, I felt it could surely appeal only to arthouse horror fans and/or those technically knowledgeable enough to appreciate the skill of Eggers’s image-making and willing to turn a blind eye to what some of the images show.  If so, these constituencies are bigger than I realised.  The Lighthouse’s international takings now amount to well over four times its $4 million budget.

    The story is set in the latter part of the nineteenth century, on an isolated island off the New England coast.  The characters are a pair of lighthouse keepers or ‘wickies’ – a grizzled veteran (Willem Dafoe) and a relative rookie (Robert Pattinson).  (The film is virtually a two-hander, except for a few brief appearances by others, usually in nightmares or other visions.)  Thomas Wake (Dafoe) is prone to flatulence and cackling-accompanied anecdotes.  Ephraim Winslow (Pattinson) is morose, his bad mood made understandably worse by Wake’s farting and ribald humour, as well as by the older man’s persistent refusal to let him look after the lantern room.  Instead, Wake assigns Winslow jobs like lugging kerosene containers and emptying chamber pots.

    Robert Eggers (who wrote the screenplay with his brother Max) hardly bothers with creating a sense of foreboding:  he’s straight into the boding.  Even the opening sequences that describe Winslow’s approach to the lighthouse are dominated by louring skies on the screen and Mark Korven’s oppressive, minatory music on the soundtrack.    What could possibly go right?   It isn’t long before Winslow is having bad dreams and regular encounters with a pesky, ominous seagull.  When he tells his companion what he’d like to do to the bird, Wake tells Winslow not to:  it’s unlucky to kill a gull, he says, because they’re reincarnations of the souls of dead sailors.  Winslow, needless to say, ignores this advice.  The avicide and its aftermath are very different from what happens with the Ancient Mariner and the albatross.  Rather than shooting the seagull, Winslow grabs hold of it and repeatedly beats it to death, anticipating the thwacking violence meted out to human beings later in the film.  It’s hard to say that Winslow pays for killing the bird – things were hardly going well in the first place.

    Nevertheless, the wind changes direction, bringing a storm to the island.  Abstinent Winslow, on what should be the last night of his four-week posting at the lighthouse (but isn’t), gives in to Wake’s urgings to take a drink.  The ferry expected to collect Winslow doesn’t show up next morning but the body of a mermaid (Valeriia Karaman) is washed up on the shore.  Wake reveals that his previous assistant wickie died, soon after losing his sanity.  Familiar consequences of screen isolation come to the fore.  With the rations available reduced to alcohol and nothing but, Ephraim Winslow’s tongue loosens; he reveals that and how he came to have an assumed identity (one that he’ll keep for the rest of this note, though).  At one point, he and Wake, with no other human contact possible, dance together.

    The increasingly unstable reality – or of Winslow’s hold on reality – allows, among other things, repeated explosions of violence.  After all, the previous explosion may not really have happened.  The only word for this is overkill.  Even when he buries Wake alive, Winslow forgets to take from him the lantern-room keys that he so covets.   It doesn’t matter because Wake escapes from the grave, tells Winslow he’ll suffer ‘a Promethean fate’ and attacks him with an axe.  The latter reciprocates and, with the keys at last in his possession, ascends to the lantern room – a flying-too-near-the-sun moment.  Overpowered by the intensity of the light that he’s ineluctably drawn towards, Winslow falls down the lighthouse steps.  In the film’s closing shot, he’s lying naked on the rocks, suffering the fate that Wake promised him, except that Prometheus’s eagle is replaced, of course, by seagulls.

    Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson both look the part.  As the weather deteriorates, Pattinson starts acting up a storm.   He tends throughout either to mumble or to shout his lines with not much in between.  In comparison, Dafoe is impeccably audible, though it might be better if he weren’t so.  The performances in The Lighthouse demand a lot of skill (and energy) yet the effect is ridiculous.  Although Robert Eggers’s debut feature The Witch (2015) was finally unsatisfying, it was absorbing to watch.  The chief virtues of this new film – Craig Lathrop’s production design and Jarin Blaschke’s (Oscar-nominated) black-and-white cinematography – are put at the service of a ragbag of psychological horror-movie clichés.   In one of several verbal showdowns, Winslow accuses Wake of being ‘a parody’ – a parody, that is, of a Melville-esque old salt.  This is right enough.  The film often seems like a parody too.

    20 February 2020

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