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May 01, 2019 Web Exclusive By Stephen Danay

It feels simultaneously obvious and impossible to write about A Face in the Crowd in 2019. Director Elia Kazan and writer Budd Schulberg’s bleak 1957 satire tracing the rise and fall of Lonesome Rhodes - a backwoods musician who lies and cheats his way into becoming one of the most powerful men in America - is so shockingly prescient regarding everything from media to politics to the internet that it almost makes one believe in crystal balls. As searing and vicious as the film must have seemed to audiences of the 1950s, modern audiences will find it all the more harrowing for how little progress we’ve made as a society.

Once again splitting the difference between European Neo-realism and the Hollywood studio system as he did with 1954’s On the Waterfront, Kazan turns his attention from big city docks to the dusty roads of northeastern Arkansas. There, earnest local radio host Marcia Jeffries stumbles across Lonesome Rhodes in a drunk tank while scouting for a human interest story. A silver-tongued raconteur with a sly wit and more folksy wisdom than an army of hack politicians, Rhodes becomes a regional success almost overnight. Eventually he and Jeffries are able to parlay his small-town fame into a bigger show based out of Memphis and eventually a national television program broadcast from New York City. By the time Rhodes is advising sinister presidential candidates in the ways of duping voters and shilling for heartless pharmaceutical companies, Jeffries realizes too late that she’s created a monster.

The first, second, third and fourth thing any modern viewer will think of while watching this film is Donald Trump. The comparisons between Rhodes and Trump are as obvious as they are imperfect. Both men swiftly and unexpectedly rise to power through a combination of misguided populism, untested new media technology and sheer arrogance. Both men are compulsive liars with hollow pits of ambition where their hearts should be. But whereas Trump is too stupid to marshal the power he’s gained in any coherent way, having never actually worked or struggled for a single day of his worthless, empty life, Rhodes comes from the gutter and better understands how to manipulate people like himself. He charms the public in his early radio shows by poking fun at his corporate sponsors - something you can hear now on any number of podcasts and Youtube channels - and by crowdfunding a new house for an African-American family. “And now an amusing example of grassroots democracy in action”, is how a news anchor introduces one of Rhodes’ early segments; you can practically taste the bitter irony as Kazan demonstrates the public welcoming its doom with open arms. Kazan’s framing of Rhodes is frequently striking - he often addresses the camera directly during his segments - but few sequences in the film are as disquieting as the one where Rhodes finally leaves his adopted hometown behind for the big city. Kazan points the camera down the side of the train at Rhodes as he hangs from the car, waving goodbye to the cheering crowd gathered to see him off. As the train pulls out of the station and the crowd is left behind, Rhodes slowly swings toward the camera, staring past it with a look like he’s going to eat the entire world.

Knowing that Andy Griffith would spend the peak of his career as a sitcom star is astonishing fact to ponder while watching his debut performance in A Face in the Crowd. It’s like if Matt LeBlanc had played Hannibal Lector before landing Friends. Griffith’s performance seems deeply indebted to the contemporary phenomenon of Elvis Presley - all wild movement and down-home country drawl - crossed with country-fried demagoguery of Huey Long. But his ‘aw-shucks’ smile slowly transforms into a rictus grin and his sparkling eyes become unhinged and manic as his ascent to the echelons of power erodes whatever soul he may have had. By the end of the film, Kazan has him enter scenes like a horror movie monster, a gaunt shadow across a wall accompanied by paranoid ravings. It’s a tour de force by any measure, made all the more impressive by being his first film role. Griffith’s mania is well balanced by Patricia Neal’s sensible, sorrowful Marcia Jeffries, whose fascination with Rhodes rots away before our eyes. Neal was a compelling and versatile actress, notable as cinema’s most laid-back femme fatale in Michael Curtiz’s The Breaking Point before going on to win a Best Actress Oscar for Hud and becoming Mrs. Roald Dahl. Although she’s the audience surrogate who gets swept up in Rhodes’ endless con, Neal never portrays Jeffries as a sap or a fool. Her hurt looks and guttural cries are painful to behold as Rhodes’ holds her financially and emotionally hostage, representing her best intentions gone horrifically wrong.

The dots connected between past and present by A Face in the Crowd are both direct and indirect. The media being in bed with hateful politicians and heartless capitalists is just as true today as it was in the late 1950s. And the film’s observations regarding the then-new medium of television and its unprecedented influence on society make for a striking parallel to the unforeseen effects the internet and social media are having on modern politics. Although quite bleak by the standards of 1957, the ending of A Face in the Crowd leaves viewers with a measure of hope, hypothesizing that while the American people are easily duped, they will eventually wise up and see the truth for what it is. From the perspective of 2019, this hard-won lesson seems tragically naive. Kazan was dead-on when it came to Americans being credulous fools; he seems to have been mistaken about how many of them would care once it’s pointed out to them.

(http://www.criterion.com/films/28703-a-face-in-the-crowd)