It astonishes me how most people are almost desperate to be conned.  One particular huckster comes to mind, somebody who seduced the American public with their everyman demeanor, only to fleece them for every cent they’re worth.  This is a monster whose appetites have grown to monstrous proportions.  Initially, they only wanted money and women.  The were extremely focused on their TV ratings.  Then they found the ultimate drug: political power.

I don’t know who you might be thinking of, but I’m talking about Andy Griffith in 1957’s A Face in the Crowd.  This was the actor’s feature film debut and it is an astonishing performance.  There is a real menace behind his “aw shucks”, self-effacing manner, a mocking contempt for the very audience which makes him a nationwide celebrity.  In a weird way, it is almost like he is parodying the image for which he would be wildly popular a decade later with his long-running, eponymously-titled TV show.

His character in this film owes all of his eventual success to Patricia Neal.  She found him in a jail in a small town in northeast Arkansas while looking for fodder for her radio show, which bears the same name as this picture.  One can imagine, and I suspect with some accuracy, her entire background just from her white dress and her enthusiasm to get some local color for her program.  It is no surprise to learn she is a Sarah Lawrence grad, nor how quickly that information is revealed.

Griffith is a guest of the jail for a week on a drunk and disorderly charge.  Something that is telling is the feral expression he has when Neal first touches his shoulder.  That will be our only direct glimpse for quite some time of the monster concealed under the cornpone shtick he wields to maximum advantage.  Then we hear the first instance of an animal bray that is his trademark laugh.  Neal, inexplicably, is charmed: “You put your whole self in that laugh.”  Griffith: “I put my whole self into everything I do.”  It is no surprise he puts one particular part of himself into a great many women, making his moniker of “Lonesome” Rhodes a tad ironic.

I found it interesting the cops failed to confiscate Griffith’s bottle when he is put up, because the first thing he does is take a swig from the one concealed in his guitar case.  Also, it is interesting to see how Neal is savvy, starting her tape recorder early and hiding the microphone, so as to catch his improvised performance.  And yet, I suspect he cottoned on to what she was doing, feigning his surprise at being captured candidly.  I say this because he knows far better how to work on-the-fly than from a script.

We’ll see this in his jump to television at a Memphis station where they try putting him in front of a ridiculous painted backdrop of a barnyard. An assistant even puts a straw of hay in the corner of Griffith’s mouth.  I was surprised Walter Matthau’s college-educated writer was needed for a show that looks as simple and daft as that one.  Then Griffith starts ad-libbing as soon as they’re live on air and, from that point, he is really running the show.  As the alleged director of this fiasco puts it: “He’s only on TV for two minutes and already he’s telling us what to do.”

With that, I really wondered why they felt the need to retain any writers.  Even more curious, there will be a scene when Griffith’s fame is nearing its peak and there will be a whole room of scribes.  This includes Matthau, who tells Neal people just sometimes walk by and slide paychecks under the door so they don’t have to acknowledge these wordsmiths even exist. 

It seems inevitable Matthau and Neal would eventually get together.  After all, they are both college-educated intellectuals, a group singularly despised by Griffith, who calls Matthau “Vanderbilt ‘44”.  But Neal cannot fight the sway her discovery’s animal magnetism has on her.  A hint of suppressed attraction occurs early on, when she feels compelled when he’s around to close the top of her blouse further, and it is already nearly buttoned up to the neck. As Griffith winkingly says to her early on: “You cold fish, respectable girls.  But inside, you want the same thing as the rest of them.”  But that cold fish will eventually warm up in a big way, in a hotel corridor in the middle of the night. In a close-up, she softly says “C’mere”.  It is a moment that positively crackles with sexual energy.  That her hotel room door closes after he follows her in is surprisingly bold stuff for 1957.

The entire film vibrates with a wiry energy.  A sequence where our star does various promotions for a garbage medicine called Vitajex has so many quick edits between increasingly surreal images that it borders on the psychedelic.  Almost as surreal is another lightning-fast distillation of a baton-twirling competition he judges, and the looks passed between him and contestant Lee Remick seems to render superfluous the inevitable physical coupling later. 

I wasn’t stunned this character would sleep with her, as this is the kind of man one can imagine bragging about how he would just…wait a mo…it seems I recall hearing something somewhere sometime.  Oh yes, that he might “grab women by the pussy”.  What is shocking is he returns to the city married to this high school student.  This is a final straw for Neal, whom Griffith had begged to marry him just before this.

She wasn’t even that startled by the appearance of a previously unknown, current wife of Griffith’s (Kay Medford) when she shows up with a demand for hush money.  Medford is very briefly on the screen, but leaves a strong impression, with a braying laugh which recalls Griffith’s.  I shiver at the thought of what would doubtlessly sound like copulating donkeys when that couple was in happier times.

Almost from the beginning, Griffith seems determined to bite off more than he can chew and, when he does, he’s going to shake it like a retriever breaking the neck of a duck in its mouth.  It is almost like he can’t help himself, braying like a literal jackass as he rides a rocket to the top, while failing it to realize it is a missile that will eventually explode.  And it will be his own big mouth that will light the detonator.  As Matthau says, “I’ll say one thing for him.  He has the courage of his ignorance.” 

But, before that fall, there will be the terrifying possibility of him being on the cabinet of Marshall Neilan when Griffith helps that man on his way to the presidency.  Once again, I seem to be reminded of somebody else.  A real-life figure who was a TV star and obsessed with ratings even once they moved onto politics.  And something about a President putting wildly inappropriate people in cabinet positions  Wait, it will come to me.

I want to say some more about Neal’s performance, because it is stunning, but easy to overlook in the shadow of Griffith’s.  While I confess I have not seen her in many films, what little I have seen has largely left me confused she is such a legend.  Something about her always left me with the impression she had a coolly unemotional persona. As such, she was perfectly cast in The Fountainhead, a terrible adaptation of Ayn Rand’s terrible book, with both film and book being as sexless and lifeless as the rest of Rand’s oeuvre.  It is a wonder that Neal momentarily expresses a raw sensuality in this later picture, when her character would largely not be out of place in the adaptation of the Rand novel.  She also smiles a fair amount here as well and, tellingly, people don’t seem to smile much in movies made of Rand’s works.

A Face in the Crowd is powerful stuff, and time has not diminished its impact.  It is unfortunately very prescient.  As Griffith says of his power: “I’m an influence, a wielder of opinions, a force.”  He’s not just an influence, but he could doubtlessly be a wildly successful influencer today.  Not unlike somebody else this movie made me think of frequently.  That selfish, loudmouth, misogynist monster with a boundless appetite for money, power and women–and I’m not sure in which order.  Matthau’s prognostication of Griffith’s future is he’ll be back on TV one day, but not in as desirable a time slot as before, and then will fade away into obscurity.  For the life of me, I can’t recall who Griffith reminded me of in this movie, but I know I wish that person would return to television or, even better, just fade away from the public consciousness permanently.

Dir: Elia Kazan

Starring Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal

Watched on Criterion Collection blu-ray