TV is the thing this year!

A Face in the Crowd 1957 Warner Brothers (125 minutes) directed by Elia Kazan; story and screenplay by Budd Schulberg.

            One of the great American classic movies, A Face in the Crowd is prescient in its take on the awesome power of television to use charisma and sex to sell everything from energy pills to presidential candidates in the moment before it became the dominant medium.

The plot is simple: country boy makes good, his success leads to the hubris which precedes his fall.

Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal), a Smith-trained musicologist who works at her uncle’s radio station in Pickett, Arkansas, discovers Larry ‘Lonesome’ Rhodes (Andy Griffith), a charismatic, gui-tar-pickin’ backwoods bad boy, in Tomahawk County Jail while recording stories and music for her weekly radio show, ‘A Face in the Crowd’. When Marcia invites Lonesome to participate, he asks, ‘What do I get out of this? Mr. Me, Myself and I?’ with a mock sullen challenge that he knows will hook her, and that tells viewers that he may not be the ‘simple country boy’ he tricks himself out to be.

What he does get starts with an early release from jail; it then parlays his talent for connecting with people, especially women, into a popular radio show in Pickett, then a television show in Memphis where he attracts the notice of Joseph ‘Joey’ De Palma (Anthony Franciosa), an ethically challenged office boy who dreams of becoming a big-time agent.

A New York advertising agency is in a quandary over the eroding market share of one of its big accounts. A research chemist tells company management and its advertiser that the problem with Vitajex, an energy pill concocted mostly of sugar, with ‘a few grains of aspirin’ and a little caffeine, is that ‘we’ve got nothing to sell.’ A ‘dignified’ message is needed, a corporate yes-man tells owner General Haynesworth (Percy Waram).

Enter Lonesome, whom De Palma talked the advertisers into bringing to the New York meeting: ‘Back where I come from, a fella looks too dignified, we figure he’s lookin’ to steal your watch.’ Lonesome turns on his charisma, first enthusing over the product with a folksy energy, then theatrically chasing first one attractive young woman, then another, around the conference room; any sense of dignity quickly makes way for an Arkansas satyr and girls in bathing suits who instantly reinvigorate Vitajex sales.

But a national television program and commercials are just the start for Lonesome and Haynesworth, his self-appointed ‘adoptive father’.

The general reminds a black-tie after dinner group discussing the campaign strategy of its stuffed shirt presidential candidate, Senator Worthington Fuller (Marshall Neilan), that ‘the mass has to be guided with a strong hand by a responsible elite,’ adding ‘in television, we have the greatest instrument for mass persuasion in the history of the world.’ The public doesn’t want ‘long-winded debates over the issues’, Lonesome chimes in. ‘We’ve got to find 35 million buyers for the product “Worthington Fuller”.’

Fuller appears on Lonesome’s television show to ‘talk to folks’ about the issues, starting with Social Security, reviled by Republicans since President Franklin Roosevelt signed it into law 22 years before. Fuller tells Lonesome’s viewers that Social Security is about ‘coddling from the cradle to the grave. I say that weakens moral fiber. Daniel Boone wasn’t looking for unemployment insurance and a pension. All he needed was his axe and his gun and a chance to hue a living out of the forest with his own hands.’

On a parallel track, Lonesome’s bad boy appeal for women and his attraction to them shows clearly through the film. The most remarkable scene comes when this hound dog flush with success judges a baton-twirling contest to decide the Miss Arkansas Drum Majorette of 1957.

Tanned and bright-eyed Betty Lou Fleckum (Lee Remick) right away catches his eye and clearly is on his mind as he declares the entire field a ‘fine representative body of wholesome young American womanhood.’ Fine indeed: the baton-twirling is dynamic, and the images of this mass of nubile, lightly clad teenaged females arrayed before Lonesome’s lupine eyes is truly wondrous. Within a week the 17-year-old Miss Fleckum is the second Mrs. Lonesome Rhodes. Lonesome’s fall comes at the hands of Marcia, his long-suffering advisor and confidante, in love with him but too sophisticated and threatening for him to marry.

Goaded by conscience and Mel Miller (Walter Matthau), a cerebral skeptic whom she hired as a staff writer, Marcia turns on the broadcast switch while the credits are rolling at the end of Lonesome’s show while he is sharing his cynical opinion of his audience with his cronies on the show, unaware that he is back on the air.

His fall is depicted in a dramatic montage in which descending floor numbers light in quick succession on a panel in a falling elevator car while calls of outrage overload the network’s switchboard. But it is also a fall not without the possibility of redemption.

The film’s studio lighting gives this black and white film a richness and depth that makes the drama dreamlike and heightens the actors’ good looks. It captures Griffith’s charisma and Remick is strikingly pretty, but the camera loves Neal; there is nothing quite like seeing her emerge from shadows at the corner of a bar dressed in black with white jewelry.
There also are cameo appearances by prominent people in early television and broadcasting, such as Walter Winchell, John Cameron Swayze, Mike Wallace, Burl Ives, Bennett Cerf, Betty Furness, Sam Levenson, Virginia Graham and many others.

Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4740dqLktqE