I’m much too young to say I grew up on The Andy Griffith Show, but I did watch it as a kid in occasional reruns and DVDs. It was a favourite of my dad’s at the age and I was curious by it, ultimately watching enough to understand and appreciate the show and its titular star. Andy Griffith was certainly a model of wholesomeness, engineered by the television show, and it informed his screen presence for decades following, up to his late career high point in Matlock -both TV characters being symbols of old-fashioned American principles around justice. And yet probably his best performance relished in the direct opposite of those themes, coming three years before Sheriff Andy Taylor made his debut on screens around the world.
A Face in the Crowd is a 1957 movie by Elia Kazan that imagines the rise to entertainment stardom and political influence of a know-nothing country bumpkin through a particular brand of television charisma that he is able to harness and weaponize for his own self-aggrandizing ends. An eerie story to be sure, viewed through the prism of nearly seventy years -though honestly even less than that. Here was a movie taking on the unwieldy power of mass media a full two decades before Network, that understood how television could sway the masses in America politically before the famous debate of the 1960 election proved it definitively. And at the heart of the story is a man who would indeed be a considerable figure within that medium with his own cultivated and recognizable brand of down-to-earth folksiness.
Of course it must be said that Andy Griffith was by all accounts a genuinely kind and charming person -which can’t be said for his alter ego here, Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes -plucked by radio journalist Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal) from an Arkansas jail where his exuberant demeanour and country singing talents on a “Face in the Crowd” program makes him an instant sensation. His own radio show follows -produced by Walter Matthau’s Mel Miller -suspicious of his character from the start, then a string of lucrative ad deals, and ultimately a TV program before he turns his fame towards political power-brokering; while his ego and unbridled lust for power grows.
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The film, which was a flop on release, has naturally seen some renewed attention in the era of Trump -that even Griffith’s on-screen son Ron Howard alluded to when he spotlighted the movie for TCM last November, just days before the election. Lonesome Rhodes is not however a Trump analogue (he is perhaps a little more like Reagan in fact) -but there is some notable similarity in the populism he takes to, the relatable contract he’s able to quickly make with the public. He’s more of a loose cannon than other entertainment figures, he “tells it like it is”. On one of the first ads he partakes in, he makes fun of the company -which gets him in hot water before the company realizes their consumers appreciate his candor about the product and his edgy personality. There is a ‘Man of the People’ air about him in the ways he acts outside the norms. Sounds very familiar. It should be no surprise his biggest advertising gig comes as the spokesperson for male supplement pills, something I’m shocked enough made it into a movie in the 1950s.
Griffith’s performance of this is a lot of fun, as he goes for the ham but in an entirely believable fashion -in fact I think his performance would strike people as more realistic now than it was back then. He conveys the genuinely attractive buoyancy of this figure from the start, his unquenchable enthusiasm and everyman background. Yet he can flip the switch easily as well, showing off the character's sinister nature, a cunning not so obvious in his public persona. It makes perfect sense as an extension of his public persona though. The signs are there in the attitude he espouses, the products he endorses -he is quite openly lascivious towards the young Betty Lou (Lee Remick), a student at one of his events whom he subsequently marries. His charisma is subversive by nature, and as much as Kazan points the finger at mass media, he is cynical about the public as well. We know he is right to be.
Rhodes was loosely inspired by a few figures, combining into a uniquely distasteful amalgam of Will Rogers, Huey Long, and Billy Graham that is nonetheless a perfect image of cult of personality populism as it is seen today. Though curiously even Kazan could not imagine this character would seek political power for himself. Indeed for as relevant as the film is, it is beholden to some fictions once considered safeguard truisms. The biggest of them being the matter of Rhodes' fall once the con is exposed. As Paul Schrader so eloquently commented on Letterboxd: "the most insidious myth of the movies is the notion that demagoguery once exposed by the media, would be rejected by the general public." What causes everyone, even his own inner circle, to turn on him, would not make the slightest dent in any analogue's popularity today. Matt Gaetz still has loyalists for considerably worse than directly mocking his fans and political ally on live television. And unlike Mel's indictment, there would be no chance of Lonesome Rhodes being forgotten.
Criterion Recommendation: Amour (2012)
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There's something about Michael Haneke's understated but heartbreaking Amour that seems to capture elder grief better than just about any other movie. Like Sarah Polley's Away From Her, it deals in devastating candor with the effects of the ailments of age on a romance. Emmanuelle Riva stars in her last great performance as Anna, a former music teacher who suffers a stroke that her doting husband Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is unprepared to tend to. With Isabelle Huppert's daughter living far away, they are forced to deal with the illness themselves in their Paris apartment, Anna determined not to be sent to a care home and Georges just as determined to honour her wishes. Dealing with difficult themes of love and age, mortality and even the moral question of euthanasia, it is a profoundly human movie above all else, and an astounding late career showcase for two of France's preeminent actors. On Haneke's part, it is a bleak film, even by his standards; but one that is overflowing with compassion and heart. It is impossible not to see some elderly loved one in one of these two characters, and though a humble film, I feel it is more than worthy of Criterion's graces.
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