A Face In The Crowd – Budd Schulberg, 1957 ★★★

Big Dreams on the Little Screen

When director Elia Kazan and writer Budd Schulberg collaborated on their next film project after the legendary On The Waterfront, it was an anticipated event. Would the new film be as good?

The answer, surprisingly, was yes, only not right away. It took audiences and critics many years to warm to A Face In The Crowd, perhaps because in 1957 its satirical take on television and marketing was too ahead of its time. Today, it seems much more relevant, if a bit quaint.

If nothing else, we are better positioned to appreciate the spectacle of Andy Griffith, not yet known as TV’s kindliest sheriff, driving his image into a ditch before he even got it. His Lonesome Rhodes is a foul-minded, manipulative, corrupt spinner of hokey cornpone wisdom who hoodwinks millions into falling in love with him:

LONESOME: This whole country is like my flock of sheep.

MARCIA: Sheep …

LONESOME: Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, shut-ins, house fraus, pea-pickers, everybody who’s got to jump when someone else blows a whistle.… They’re mine. I own ’em. They think like I do, only they’re even more mule-stupid than I am, so I gotta think for ’em.

Reading these words doesn’t have the same impact as watching Andy Taylor deliver them himself, but it was an option readers had in 1957. Even before the movie’s release, Random House published what Kazan in an introduction claimed “bespeaks a new dignity” in the art of screenwriting, a published edition of the original shooting script before it was transformed into a completed movie.

Screenwriter Budd Schulberg with director Elia Kazan after both won Oscars in 1955 for On The Waterfront. Kazan notes having Schulberg on set for A Face In The Crowd was unusual but necessary. "I was at his call and often at his side in the months he was writing it," Kazan wrote. "He was at my side when my active work began."
Image from https://starsandletters.blogspot.com/2016/10/im-not-insane-about-brando-for-this.html

If A Face In The Crowd had been a hit, could this have started a trend?

The challenge of appreciating any movie simply by reading it is harder than it might seem. Screenplays are not meant for bookshelves any more than maps are for artistic expression. A screenplay is a means to an end, not the end itself, giving director, actors, and others clarity to achieve, and hopefully even exceed, a writer’s vision.

With A Face In The Crowd, Schulberg had a very ambitious vision, a blistering social commentary at the state of America in the age of television and mass marketing. What if a totally unhinged individual was able to use electronic media to take hold of the country?

When roving radio reporter Marcia Jeffries first sees Lonesome Rhodes, he is sleeping off a drunk in an Arkansas county jail. His companions are a fellow drunk, Beanie, and what he calls his “Mama Guitar.” Rhodes has a gift for song; as he extemporizes a few verses for Marcia’s tape recorder, she sees something more than a story.

MARCIA: You put your whole self into that laugh, don’t you?

LONESOME (Suggestively): Marshy, I put my whole self into everythin’ I do.

MARCIA meets his frank stare, embarrassed but not unaffected.

Lonesome Rhodes (Andy Griffith) is discovered in an Arkansas jail by Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal, at right.) One aspect of the film you don't get from the screenplay is the musicality of the film and its characters. Lonesome even whips out a rock 'n' roll number.
Image from https://www.thepennmoviegoer.com/movie-review/a-face-in-the-crowd

Lonesome has a lot of off-the-cuff songs and funny stories about imaginary uncles back home in Riddle. But he has a lot of baggage, too. When Marcia gets him a regular spot on her uncle’s radio station, Rhodes attracts listeners and advertisers, but with a recklessness that seems calculated at testing limits and hurting those who annoy him.

This both attracts and unnerves Marcia, a southern girl with East Coast liberal notions picked up at Sarah Lawrence College. She admires Lonesome for his success and takes pride in discovering him. Soon they take Lonesome’s act to a Memphis television station and, after overcoming her hesitancy, share a hotel room.

As his success grows and grows, Lonesome proves a dangerous narcissist, both to Marcia and society at large. “You’ve got to be a saint to stand off the power this little box can give you,” observes one of Lonesome’s writers in the script’s second half. Lonesome ain’t that.

Schulberg based the screenplay on his short story “Your Arkansas Traveler” and the legend of Will Rogers, a much-beloved media figure of the 1930s who evidently had a dark side. Kazan also notes the story of Huey Long, a Louisiana populist politician who became quite powerful before he was murdered at the height of his success.

In the introduction, Kazan mentions several celebrities whose careers influenced the character of Lonesome. One was Arthur Godfrey (above), whose folksy image hid a much nastier side. Like Rhodes, Godfrey was known for his cruelty to others when he thought the cameras were off.
Image from https://greatentertainersarchives.blogspot.com/2012/02/dark-side-of-arthur-godfrey.html

Not having read “Your Arkansas Traveler,” I can’t say whether Kazan got Schulberg to transform Lonesome into more of a political figure than he had been in the short story. But his ideology is a sudden shift. In the beginning Rhodes is a rebel looking to cash in on his success. Later, when he begins parroting right-wing bromides about smaller government and less public spending, he seems more a channel for Kazan and Schulberg to lampoon post-McCarthy Republicans.

Much of this is quite funny, especially on screen. Lonesome develops his own on-air platform, the Lonesome Rhodes’ Cracker Barrel, for “soundin’ off on everything from the price of popcorn to the hydrogen bomb.” Isolationist Senator Worthington Fuller even joins him on-air in suit and tie to talk about fishing and cutting Social Security.

Yet A Face In The Crowd works best for me as a two-handed piece, one being a send-up on mass marketing and the other a love story between Marcia and a man she can’t quite let go of. He may be based on Will Rogers, but there’s a lot of Dracula in Lonesome, too.

Lonesome Rhodes attaches his celebrity to a product every bit as suspect as he: Vitajex. It's an energy supplement, essentially worthless, sold via television across the country. Asked if there is anything wrong with Vitajex, a research chemist replies: "It's relatively harmless."
Image from https://www.brianrxm.com/comdir/cnsmovie_faceinthecrowd.htm

The best scene in the book features politics but is really about marketing, when Rhodes tees off on Fuller about earning the voters’s respect:

LONESOME (Chucking patronizingly over the word): Respect! Did you ever hear of anyone buying any product – beer, hair rinse, tissues – because they respect it? (Suddenly rises, throws his arms around himself obviously saying “Look at me”) You’ve got to be loved, man, loved!

Strong humor is A Face In The Crowd’s big takeaway; even on the page it crackles. Other elements resonate less. Mel Miller, the disenchanted scriptwriter who is played with sardonic appeal in the film by Walter Matthau, comes off as a scoldy vessel for some overbearing author’s commentary, opining on the danger of Lonesome’s success and the ignorance of his message in case someone missed it. It’s too on the nose.

MEL: I don’t think this copy is quite illiterate enough.

Lonesome at movie's end. Today when people talk about A Face In The Crowd, it is to call Lonesome a precursor of Donald Trump. Yet Trump never played a gentle on-air bumpkin. Lonesome can be seen as a tragic figure, undone by naivete as well as hubris. In the end, he's not his own man.
Image from https://www.belcourt.org/films/a-face-in-the-crowd/

Visually, the movie gains also from other elements that don’t play so well on the page, like a jumpy live telecast or cameos by real newsmen and other celebrities of the day. Most importantly, the relationship between Lonesome and Marcia lacks the same degree of combustibility and credibility without Andy Griffith and Patricia Neal playing off each other as smoothy and suggestively as they do in the movie.

The pair packages Lonesome’s narcissism, and Marcia’s dependency, in a way that make their actions more understandable than in the book.

What this screenplay of A Face In The Crowd does have is a slightly more adult awareness of the nature of Marcia and Lonesome’s relationship, as well as Lonesome’s horndog ways. He comes across a more rancid character on the page, but also at times more appealing.

Kazan notes in his introduction that A Face In The Crowd represented part of a shift toward more literate filmmaking that would lift screenwriters from the shadows. That never happened, but this is a fine script, worth reading especially if you know the movie well and want to see what they left out or better appreciate what they kept in.