The 1957 film did not win an Academy Award. It is not in the top 100 movies of all time listed by the American Film Institute. But “A Face in the Crowd” excelled in a very unusual category, i.e. prophecy.
The film predicts what television might do to our politics. The prediction has proven to be all too true. Consider, if you will, the story it tells and compare that story to the rise of Donald Trump and Herschel Walker.
Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, played by Andy Griffith in his film debut, is an Arkansas grifter who plays the guitar, sings, and cracks jokes about people in authority. A local radio reporter, Marcia Jeffries, played by Patricia Neal, discovers him in a jail and puts him on the air. When the sheriff who jailed him runs for mayor, Rhodes declares that the sheriff is not fit to run for dogcatcher, and invites the public to bring stray dogs to the sheriff’s house. Canine pandemonium ensues.
“How does it feel,” the reporter asks him, “saying anything that comes into your head and being able to sway people like this?” Later he tells her, “you know you ought not to believe everything I say.”
Soon Rhodes moves on to a Memphis TV station. He ridicules the mattress company that sponsors him, tears up his contract in front of the camera and declares himself a “free man.” The mattress company’s sales go up 55%.
An agent takes him to New York. There he boosts the sales of a worthless pill, Vitajex, by inventing slogans that suggest, but do not actually say, that it boosts sexual performance: Gobble up Vitajex “and your battery is charged.” He becomes a national TV personality. Then the maker of the pill engages him to sell the candidacy of a Presidential hopeful, an isolationist who opposes Social Security on the ground that Daniel Boone did not need it.
When asked about dignity, Rhodes says “where I’m from a fellow looks too dignified we figure he’s going to steal your watch.” As to respect, he offers the observation “did you ever hear of anybody buying a product, beer, hair rinse, tissue, because they respect it? You gotta be loved.”
He recognizes the power TV gives him. He says of his followers that he could “murder ‘em” by smiling. He adds “They are mine. I own them. They think like I do. Only they are even more stupid than I am so I have to think for them.”
Women are his undoing. He promises to marry the reporter but enjoys other women. Then a more-or-less former wife shows up and gets paid for her silence. Rhodes heads to Mexico to get a divorce. But on the way he picks up the winner of the Arkansas baton twirling championship and marries her.
At the end of his national TV show, a precursor of Hee-Haw, the reporter gets her revenge. When the microphones are supposed to be off, he grins into the camera while saying, “To those morons out there, I can take chicken fertilizer and convince them it is caviar.” But in the control room the reporter he jilted had turned the microphones back on so the “morons” could hear him. Before he leaves the studio he has lost his show, his sponsor, and even his agent. He ends the film speaking to an audience of one - his flunky who turns on and off an applause machine.
Donald Trump made his real money on TV playing a businessman. With no more experience than Lonesome Rhodes, he got elected president. A variety of women were paid for their silence. He has been known to question the intelligence of the customers in his casinos, and famously bragged that he could shoot someone dead on the street and not lose his following. Now Herschel Walker, who achieved TV celebrity on the football field, is taken seriously as a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Georgia despite his inexperience and moral failures.
At an earlier point a writer played by Walter Matthau has looked at Rhodes on TV and said “It’s dangerous…You gotta be a saint to withstand the power that little box can give you.” In light of today’s politics, that power cannot be denied.
Budd Schulberg wrote the script. Elia Kazan directed the film. They were, unfortunately, onto something important.
Luther Munford is a Northsider.
