A Face in the Crowd (film)


A Face in the Crowd is a 1957 American drama film starring Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal and Walter Matthau, directed by Elia Kazan. The screenplay is by Budd Schulberg and is based on his short story "Your Arkansas Traveler", from the collection Some Faces in the Crowd.
The story centers on Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes, a drifter who is discovered by the producer of a small-market radio program in rural northeast Arkansas. Rhodes ultimately rises to great fame and influence on national television. The character was inspired by Schulberg's acquaintance with Will Rogers Jr. The successes of Arthur Godfrey and Tennessee Ernie Ford were also acknowledged in the screenplay.
The film launched Griffith into stardom but got mixed reviews upon its original release. Later decades have seen favorable reappraisals of the movie, and in 2008 it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Plot

In late 1950s America, radio journalist Marcia Jeffries encounters a drunken drifter, Larry Rhodes, while recording a segment at a rural Arkansas jail. She invites him to speak to the audience and sing while playing his guitar, and his raw voice, folksy humor and personal charm make him instantly popular. Marcia dubs him "Lonesome" Rhodes and fast-tracks him onto his own radio program.
Marcia enlists the support of the show's staff writer Mel Miller and witnesses the charismatic Rhodes ad-lib his way to Memphis-area popularity, effectively criticizing local politicians along the way.
When he pokes fun at his sponsor, a mattress company, it initially pull its ads, but when his adoring audience revolts, burning mattresses in the street, the sponsor discovers that Rhodes's irreverent pitches actually increased sales by 55%, and Rhodes returns to the air with a new awareness of his persuasive power. He begins an affair with Marcia and proposes to her.
An ambitious office worker at the mattress company, Joey DePalma, puts together a deal for Rhodes to star in a new TV show in New York City. The sponsor is Vitajex, an energy supplement that Rhodes ingeniously reimagines as a yellow pill marketed as a male enhancement product. As his fame, influence, and ego increase, Rhodes is enlisted to improve the appeal of presidential hopeful Senator Worthington Fuller of California, and rebrands the stuffy conservative as an everyman with a folksy nickname.
In contrast to his friendly onscreen persona, Rhodes has privately become an egomaniac who berates his staff. Marcia's hopes of marrying Rhodes are dashed, first when a woman turns up claiming to be his legitimate wife, and then when he returns from alleged divorce proceedings in Mexico, newly married to a 17-year-old drum majorette. Rhodes and Marcia enter into a profit-sharing agreement after she reminds him of her role in his success.
Ultimately, Rhodes's ascent into fame and arrogance begins to turn on him. Joey has an affair with his young wife; Rhodes dumps her and sends her back to Arkansas, but can't get out of his business arrangement with Joey, who threatens to reveal Rhodes's secrets.
Rhodes visits Marcia, who has come to regret her role in making him famous while he proposed his "Fighters for Fuller" proposal. While Rhodes gets comfortable, Marcia leaves in the rain. To destroy him, she activates a live microphone over the end credits of his TV show that reveals Rhodes contemptuously mocking Fuller and the station's "idiot" viewers. His popularity and the show's ratings plummet, and the advertisers cancel their sponsorships, as Rhodes descends in an elevator to the ground floor.
Rhodes returns to his penthouse, where he was scheduled to address the nation's business and political elite, only to find the room empty, except for his friend, Beany, and a few African American servants, whom he dismisses when they don't respond to his demands. He discovers the truth during a phone call with Mel and Marcia and threatens suicide, but Marcia only goads him on. When the pair arrive at Rhodes's home, they find him speaking with an applause machine replacing the people whose support he lost. They confess everything and Marcia demands he never call her again.
Before they leave, Mel lays out a prediction of Rhodes's future: his career is not completely over, and he will likely find further TV work soon, but never again enjoy the same level of popularity and prestige. After leaving the building, Mel and Marcia hear Rhodes screaming from the penthouse, for Marcia to return to him, but ignore him as they depart into the night in a taxi, as a Coca-Cola sign in neon lights flashes continuously.

Cast

Production

Most of the film's interiors were shot in New York at the Biograph Studios in the Bronx. This was preceded by shooting in Memphis and Piggott, Arkansas, where Rhodes meets Betty Lou.
Contemporary newspapers reported an early 1956 trip by Kazan to Sarasota, Florida, to confer with Schulberg. Late in April, columnist Walter Winchell noted that Andy Griffith would depart the cast of his Broadway show No Time for Sergeants at the end of July, vacation for a month, and then begin shooting with Kazan. Kazan and Schulberg spent much of July and August 1956 in Memphis and in Arkansas, and Patricia Neal's involvement would be announced by early August. Both Griffith and Lee Remick made their film debuts in Face.
The most involved location shoot was in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, standing in for Piggott in the fair and baton-twirling competition scenes. Five thousand extras were sought, to be fed and paid $1 hourly for a mid-August day's work. Sixty baton twirlers and musicians from six different high school bands were rounded up from Arkansas and Missouri. Remick reported spending two weeks in Piggott living with teen twirler Amanda Robinson and her family, working on her twirling and local accent. Some of her baton-twirling scenes used a double. At the Piggott location shoot some 380 dogs were assembled from Missouri and Arkansas for the scene following Rhodes's first mass-action call on his audience: to take their dogs to the home of a local sheriff who was running for higher office to find out if a candidate is worthy of the office of dog catcher.
Shooting in New York included 61 sets at Biograph Studios as well as some exteriors. The scene of the network headquarters switchboard was NBC, 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Anthony Franciosa, eager to work with Kazan, had turned down a more lucrative offer to appear in MGM's The Vintage. Schulberg remained involved throughout: "I went on a trip in 1955 to scout a location in Arkansas, and I've been on the set every day since shooting started in August ."
In stage performance, Griffith noted, he would work gradually up to his most intense moments, but needed to conjure that up spontaneously when shooting such scenes for Kazan. In some instances, he asked to have a few discarded chairs available to destroy, in order to work up his rage before filming.
Big Jeff Bess, who portrayed the Sheriff under his own name, was a country singer and bandleader in Nashville who led Big Jeff and his Radio Playboys. He was once married to Tootsie Bess, owner of Tootsie's Orchid Lounge.

Critical reception

Upon its original release, A Face in the Crowd got mixed reviews, one from Bosley Crowther of The New York Times. Though he applauded Griffith's performance, Crowther felt that the character overshadowed the rest of the cast and the story. "As a consequence, the dominance of the hero and his monstrous momentum... eventually become a bit monotonous when they are not truly opposed." Crowther found Rhodes "highly entertaining and well worth pondering when he is on the rise", but called the ending "inane".
One critic who had only praise for the movie was François Truffaut; in his Cahiers du cinéma review, he called it "a great and beautiful work whose importance transcends the dimensions of a cinema review".
Over the decades, critical opinion of the film has warmed considerably. A Face in the Crowd has an 87% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 31 reviews, with an average rating of 8.11/10. The critical consensus reads, "A raucous Andy Griffith channels the corruptive influence of celebrity in Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd, a prescient critique of American media."