Movies I Love, Part XXVI: “A Face In The Crowd”

Posted: October 25th, 2009 | Filed under: Cinema | No Comments »

The following is not a quote from Rush Limbaugh.

Or Glenn Beck.

Or Keith Olbermann.

“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 all gonna be ‘Fighters for Fuller’. They’re mine! I own ’em! They think like I do. Only they’re even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for ’em. Marcia, you just wait and see. I’m gonna be the power behind the president – and you’ll be the power behind me!”

The words belong to a character, Lonesome Rhodes, in a film that was way more a harbinger of things to come than we could have ever imagined when it was released in 1957. He was played by Andy Griffith in his film debut, several years before he became a beloved icon as Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry.

He was heralded as the next Brando or James Dean.

Check out the trailer.

The Elia Kazan film features some amazing performances from Patricia O’Neal and Walter Matthau and Anthony Franciosa. It’s the cinematic debut of Lee Remick. She’s the comely teenager that becomes Rhodes lust object.

More important, the film accurately portrays the future of politics and culture. More sound bites. Less substance. Charismatic Pied Pipers leading flocks of followers wherever he or she wishes. The increased use of electronic media to convey political polemics.

It is an eerie look into the future. But abundantly accurate.

Of course, Griffith didn’t morph into Brando or Dean. Thank heavens.

But, in a calmer Eisenhower America, he did a mighty prescient imitation of Glenn Beck more than a half century before that poseur came on the scene.

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