“It’s no surprise that Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd has earned a Hall of Fame spot in the era of Donald Trump, American President. More than one writer has called out the similarities between the 1957 film’s influential man of the people, Lonesome Rhoades, and the man now occupying the Oval Office. Each has a persona crafted by and for television and uses it, with the help of enablers, to sell products and amass power. That the film’s story continues to resonate after 60-plus years is a clear sign of its enduring cinematic value. Nonetheless, A Face in the Crowd is a reflection of its time.
“Both director Elia Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg had been caught up in the Hollywood Red scare of the early 1950s. Bullied by the outsized influence of populist demagogue Joseph McCarthy, they went on to name names (Kazan more famously than Schulberg). But they came out the other side with the all-around success of 1954’s On the Waterfront.
“For A Face in the Crowd, their second collaboration, Kazan and Schulberg fixed on an actual enemy of the people. They traveled to locations in Arkansas, the ad agencies of Madison Avenue, and the nation’s capital, where they met with politicians including Lyndon Johnson. The research was knit together to craft this prescient view of how circumstance, media, marketing and politics can turn a fast talker in a drunk tank into a megalomaniacal king of all media.
“It’s Patricia Neal’s Marcia Jeffries, the daughter of an Arkansas radio station owner, who finds Larry Rhoades in that drunk tank and gives him the name ‘Lonesome.’ Andy Griffith, in one of the best-ever film debuts, brays at the nickname before you can see him trying it on in his mind and deciding he likes the fit. Marcia is looking for real-life stories for a new series, and in Lonesome, she finds a born charmer who dishes out common man parables between raw blues strummed out on an old guitar.
“Lonesome’s natural talent leads to his own show and it’s so popular, he’s able to successfully wrangle the locals into trolling the local sheriff who’d arrested him. The incident is Lonesome’s introduction to his new power over everyday people, and he likes the fit of that even better than the name. He dubs Marcia his Gal Friday through Thursday, leaning on her as he gets his own TV show in Memphis, then a network deal in New York, then a lucrative sponsorship deal for a worthless supplement and a consulting gig with a politician unschooled in populist spin.
“Marcia falls for the man and his manipulations, too, until she comes to realize their relationship is less romantic and more like Dr. Frankenstein and his monster (she gets a push from Walter Matthau’s sardonic TV writer and Lonesome’s decision to take up with Lee Remick’s teenage baton twirler). As she raised him up, Marcia ultimately takes Lonesome down in the rightfully famous scene of Lonesome spewing his contempt for his show’s audience into a mic she switches from cold to hot.
“For all the ways in which Lonesome’s story might bring to mind the former star of The Apprentice, there are a couple of essential differences. Lonesome is an American Dream of a corrupted soul, a man able to rise from literally rock bottom to a Manhattan penthouse in no small part through raw intelligence and instinct, which he deploys from the moment he pulls himself off the jailhouse floor and asks Marcia what he gets out of being on her show. The current reality showman followed a more classically aristocratic track, needing only wealth, privilege and the chutzpah that comes with them. And the character of Lonesome existed in a time before the melding of news, entertainment, and media splintered and warped what’s accepted as true, in which saying something heinous into a mic would virtually guarantee a backlash. Our nation has never been perfect, but back then, in this way at least, it was closer to great.” ~ Melissa Starker
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