the courage of his
ignorance
by Douglas Messerli
Budd
Schulberg (screenplay, based on his own story), Elia Kazan (director) A Face in the Crowd / 1957
Over the years, as a former “southernist”
(definition: a writer about the literature of the American South) I have
developed a late-in-life admiration for country-western music and for the kind
“Grand Ole Opry” ballads which for years I couldn’t abide. I was also never a
true fan of Andy Griffith’s kind of mild, down-home philosophizing, and,
although I saw Griffith early-on in No
Time for Sergeants and, with family surrounding (it would have taken a
revolution in my house to have asked for different TV fare), I endured numerous
episodes of the Griffith stories in Mayberry, replete with his hometown,
cornball flavored miniatures. My father loved it; he was a great believer in
the common man, with whom he felt throughout his life he had ties despite his
having reached an educational plateau and position of educational power that
made him skeptical of their values.

This Lonesome Rhodes is, from the get-go, a fraud, a man of the people
perfectly willing to use his audience as a tool, not only for easy profits,
but, most importantly, power. For Lonesome, his whole community is “just my
flock of sheep!”
Lonesome: Rednecks,
crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus,
shut-ins, pea-pickers—everybody that’s got to jump
when somebody else blows the whistle. They don’t
know it yet, but they’re gonna be “fighters
for Fuller’ [the
rightist politician who has paid enough shut-ins, pea-pickers—everybody that’s got to jump
when somebody else blows the whistle. They don’t
know it yet, but they’re gonna be “fighters
money for his support]. They’re mine! I own ‘em,
Marcia, you just wait and see.I’m gonna be the power
behind the president—and you’ll be the power behind
me!
Once the author and director have established their likable figure as such a sham, there isn’t much more to say. There are wonderful moments of betrayal, DePalma’s sleazy interferences, Jeffries’ displaced love for her Frankenstein, and Betty Lou Fleckum’s (Lee Remick’s) flashy, baton twirling entwinement of herself with the errant lover (Jeffries: “Betty Lou is your public, all wrapped up with yellow ribbons into one cute little package. She’s the logical culmination of the great 20th-century love affair between Lonesome Rhodes and his mass audience.”)—but none of these can save the film from its dreadful tumble into misanthropy. Lonesome Rhodes, so the film proclaims—again and again and again—is a manipulator, a country hokum manufacturer of pure vulgar ignorance, worthy of the on-line betrayal by Jeffries of her would-be lover, turning up the volume (oh how many political figures have been just so betrayed by open mikes and evil-minded engineers) to reveal his description of his admirers as “idiots, morons, and guinea pigs.”
In
the case of this film, however, the evil-minded engineers have been its
creators all along, smugly determined that its hick hero gets his due, without
them comprehending any of his natural appeal. As I said, I have never been a
great admirer of Andy Griffith, but in this role he certainly deserved better.
And, in that context, it saddened me to hear of Griffith's death on July 3 at
the age of 86.
In
his role as a liberal agitator of American political causes, Kazan has always
had a problem of credibility, particularly after he named names to the McCarthy
committee; but here we have to recognize that he is also basically intolerant
of a large swath of American folk culture, dismissing it with the slap-down
petulance of an homegrown American fascist, a role which he has, perhaps
mistakenly, deflected upon his far a more innocent hero. The fears the author
and director project about the rising American TV industry, have also been
realized in the very film they have created—despite the film’s National Film
Registry acclimation.
No comments:
Post a Comment