Bret Primack, aka Jazz Video Guy, has a post about A Face in the Crowd (1957), chilling movie starring Andy Griffith. Here's how it opens:
There’s a drunk in an Arkansas jail who’s about to become the most powerful man in America.
He can’t help himself. He’s funny, loose, dangerous, and magnetic in ways that make you lean toward him even when something in the back of your brain is sending signals you’re choosing to ignore. His name is Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, and Elia Kazan put him on screen in 1957, which means the film has now spent nearly seven decades being more relevant than it was the year before.
If you haven’t seen it, stop reading, scroll down watch it first. If you have seen it, you already know what I’m about to say.
Kazan made A Face in the Crowd with screenwriter Budd Schulberg, fresh off On the Waterfront. Both men were carrying complicated personal freight — they’d each named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Schulberg in 1951, Kazan in 1952. Both were condemned by significant portions of the Hollywood left, and that condemnation followed them. [...] What they actually made was something darker and more personal than a political warning — a film built by two men who understood betrayal from the inside. [...]
Lonesome Rhodes is not just a villain. He’s a product. His raw, folksy charm makes him an instant hit on local radio, and the machine takes it from there — television, sponsors, politicians, handlers. As his power grows, so does his contempt for the audience that made him. He holds his followers in private disdain while publicly celebrating them as the heartland soul of America. The film understands something that most political films miss entirely: authenticity itself can be manufactured, and the more real someone seems, the more carefully that realness has been constructed.
When it was released in 1957, critics called it unrealistic. Too paranoid. Too on the nose. That’s worth sitting with for a moment — the scenario that seemed like exaggeration then is now just Tuesday.
Andy Griffith’s performance is the reason the film works at the visceral level. He had almost no film experience before Kazan cast him, and that rawness is inseparable from what he does on screen. There’s no technique getting in the way. [...]
Kazan reportedly called it one of the finest performances he ever directed. Given that Kazan worked with Brando at his peak, that’s not a throwaway remark.
Contemporary resonance:
The comparison to Donald Trump gets made every time this film is discussed, and it holds up to a point. The billionaire performing as populist, the television personality who understands the medium as a tool of dominance rather than information, the contempt that surfaces in unguarded moments, the persona of success constructed over a private reality of failures. Rhodes and Trump share the same operating mechanism.
But the comparison reveals where the film’s imagination ran out. Rhodes is ultimately destroyed. The hot mic moment — caught mocking the very people who worship him — ends him. Schulberg and Kazan still believed in a rational audience that could be shocked back to its senses. That faith looks genuinely touching now, the faith of men who lived before the complete dissolution of shared reality.
Trump’s supporters processed every exposure, every revelation, every unguarded moment, and stayed loyal. The mask slipped repeatedly and it didn’t matter, because the audience had decided the mask was the point. What Kazan and Schulberg couldn’t anticipate was social media removing the last gatekeepers, so that the Lonesome Rhodes dynamic now operates at a scale and speed that makes 1957 network television look like a church bulletin.
The film identified a structural vulnerability in media democracy — that charisma plus television produces a kind of power that bypasses argument and rational persuasion entirely. What it couldn’t imagine was an audience that already knew, and didn’t care.
There's much more at the link. The full article is worth reading. And if you've not seen the film, do so.
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