THE POPULIST PARABLE OF ELIA KAZAN’S A FACE IN THE CROWD:

Miller’s rumination at the end of Rhodes’s meteoric career provides the film’s moral: “we get wise to them, that’s our strength. We get wise to them.” This sentiment is a hopefully populist notion, since it assumes that the average person’s ability to call out frauds and hucksters is in itself a bulwark against their rise to power. I hate to say it, but today this sounds almost naively optimistic. Perhaps Lincoln was right that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, but we can never be sure that the unfooled will be in the majority. And numbers are what matter.

What’s most disturbing about today’s crop of media-hyped demagogues isn’t that they are adored despite their faults—such as vulgarity, spite, ignorance, egomania, and greed—but precisely because of them. Embracing one’s mendacity is what passes for authenticity to many nowadays, as much as class signifiers like a twangy country accent and wearing denim used to do for the Rhodes types of yesteryear. Plenty of people in the public eye nowadays are just as venal as Rhodes is, but many no longer feel the need to even bother to disguise it.

A film like A Face in the Crowd is intended to be the antidote to this kind of demagoguery and media manipulation, and its searing ironies might open some eyes. But the key variable with satire isn’t always the artist—it’s the audience. No matter how keen the wit or jaundiced the eye, there’s simply no telling how many people will bother to pay attention long enough to hear the alarm bell that the satirist is ringing. The fact that the movie flopped when it came out in the summer of 1957 might have something to do with Kazan’s reputation at the time, but it doesn’t bode well for the prescription that it tries to offer to the body politic. If anything, with the benefit of hindsight, A Face in the Crowd seems more like a desperate prophecy than anything else, as its trenchant message goes unheeded even as it becomes freshly relevant with every election cycle.

While Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg  were careful not to spell out “Lonesome” Rhodes’ ideology, other than as a man with an unquenchable id, the character they created for Andy Griffith was partially inspired by Arthur Godfrey, who demolished his good guy image in 1953 by firing sidekick Julius LaRosa on the air. Less than 20 years later, Godfrey would reveal himself as yet another “Progressive against progress” when he spoke out against American supersonic passenger plane development in the early 1970s on the Dick Cavett Show, adding nastily that the US needs “that gook in the atmosphere about as much as we need another bag of those clunkers from the moon,” according to Cavett himself in a 2010 New York Times article. As for Andy Griffith, he would veer back towards his “Lonesome” Rhodes persona in his last years, by shilling for Obamacare in 2010. As Kathy Shaidle asked of Media Matters (who routinely compared Glenn Beck at the height of his superstardom to Rhodes), “What? No ‘Lonesome Roads’ references when they’d actually be appropriate?”