Anthony Franciosa | Poffy's Movie Mania

A FACE IN THE CROWD

Poffy The Cucumber — Mon, 28 Jul 2014 06:33:03 +0000

Empty Vessel, Most Noise.

He went from being a radio personality to a TV superstar, with his hate-speak and political lies, ultimately driving the course of political movements with his disinformation, empty rhetoric, and outright falsehoods, until he was brought down when his redneck public discerned his ultimate snake-oil shallowness. If you think I’m talking about Glenn Beck, I am. It’s also the story of Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes in A FACE IN THE CROWD.

Political monolith Keith Olbermann piqued my interest in this movie by constantly referring to asinine political commentator Glenn Beck as Lonesome Rhodes Beck. Olbermann would occasionally cite the movie from whence he drew the analogy.

In this 1957 film, written presciently by Bud Schulberg and directed kinetically by Elia Kazan, Andy Griffith is Larry Rhodes – a Brando-esque titan from his first seconds onscreen. You heard me: this is not the Andy Griffith from Mayberry NC whom everybody loves for his suffocating kindness and goodness. Rhodes is a rough-hewn black diamond that Griffith carved from battery acid and demon seed long before Opie and Barney and Aunt Bee turned him into, well, Andy Griffith.

Rhodes is discovered sleeping it off in a small-town jailhouse by Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal), searching for a human interest story for her radio show. (This was back when a good-looking woman with cheekbones like Optimus Prime and a waist the size of a wrist could roam amongst the perps in a jail cell with no fear of being ass-raped. Maybe in Mayberry…) Marcia is so taken with the self-aggrandizing, lusty redneck drifter Rhodes, she commissions him for her radio show, “A Face In The Crowd,” letting him be as loudmouth, ribald, passionate and charming as all get-out. And the ratings create a monster…

At first it’s all catchy songs and down-home stories. Rhodes: “I put my whole self into everything I do!” His rise to fame is meteoric: a ship is named after him, a mountain, awards, until he’s bigger than the Beatles who were bigger than Jesus. After he starts believing his own myth, he starts exploiting his power: “I’m not just an entertainer – I’m an influence, a wielder of opinions, a force!”… “My flock of sheep, rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, housefraus, shutins, pea-pickers; everybody that’s got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle – they’re even more stupid than I am, so I got a thing for ’em…” Lonesome’s hubris, coupled with his inborn ignorance, would be his downfall. See Glenn Beck.

Walter Matthau is newspaperman Mel, a conscience whom Marcia desperately needs when her reality slips under the cogs of Lonesome. Lee Remick, her eyes like diamonds aglow, is the most beautiful girl in the world at this point in time, and a teen fling for Lonesome.

Was director Kazan the man responsible for bringing out such feral energy in Griffith, as he did with Brando in A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (1951) and ON THE WATERFRONT (1954), and as he did with James Dean in EAST OF EDEN (1955)? He makes Griffith’s Lonesome a despicable character; we never take to him as a once-innocent soul now corrupted – we can smell the shit he’s shoveling from his first seconds onscreen. (And he even gets his “Stella!” moment, crying “Marsha! Marsha!” from the top of the stairs rather than the bottom, and in a very different context than Brando.)

In this parable that presages NETWORK (1976) by two decades, they speak of politics becoming entertainment, we see the pitfalls of demagoguery, and Republicans still trying to cut social security and unemployment benefits! It is disturbing to see the venality in marketing that we thought only arrived with modern capitalism: boosting sales of the placebo Vitajex by changing its color from white to yellow (“the color of sunshine”). And we shudder at the oligarchic politicians supposedly in a democracy, who buy Lonesome for a dollar and a compliment: “Television is a wielder of opinion, an institution positively sacred to this country, like the Washington Monument… Every strong, healthy society from the Egyptians on, the mass had to be guided with a strong hand by a responsible elite. In TV, we have the greatest instrument of mass persuasion in the history of the world!”

Holding up across time, this movie even captures that “modern” tripup of dignitaries and trashy celebs alike – the “off-mic” moment: when public personas think they are “off microphone” but somewhere, a mic is picking up their every word and – more damningly – their contempt for their audience. (Obama’s “I’ll have more leverage in my second term” that revealed the man had hubris after all; Romney’s “47% of Americans are freeloaders” that lost him a presidency.)

The film is also intrinsically racist in all those subtle ways that we forget are racism for their accepted ubiquity: The owner of a radio station has a black man polishing his shoes near his desk as he listens to Lonesome; owner scruffs the black man’s hair, “You like him?” “Yessuh ah do!” Look at the dominant-subjugated positioning of these two; look at the infantilizing attitude of the white guy. That black guy might as well be a slave – he might actually BE a slave! In real life!

Matthau gives a prescient eulogy of Lonesome’s career, that describes the arc of most ideologues; it is not black and white, not winning or losing outright, but a slow death over a spit, “You’ll be back with a show -probably not top 5 or 10 – some people will remember, some won’t…”

A FACE IN THE CROWD is indeed prophetic, as it portrays Lonesome’s popularity decline exactly as his real life avatar’s popularity declined. Thankfully, like Lonesome Rhodes, Glenn Beck would become just another face in the crowd.

END

A FACE IN THE CROWD (Jun 1957) | Approved
Director: Elia Kazan.
Writer: Bud Schulberg.
Music: Tom Glazer.
Starring: Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, Anthony Franciosa, Walter Matthau, Lee Remick, Percy Waram, Paul McGrath, Rod Brasfield, Marshall Neilan, Alexander Kirkland, Charles Irving, Howard Smith, Kay Medford, Big Jeff Bess, Henry Sharp.

imdb
Word Count: 950 No. 998

Spread the love

DEATH WISH II

Poffy The Cucumber — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 10:51:11 +0000

Wish it wasn’t.

Charles Bronson returns as vigilante Paul Kersey in DEATH WISH II. And we wish he hadn’t. We got the point in DEATH WISH (1974): True justice is revenge. And people like it that way – just too pigeon-scared to admit it in “civilized” society. So now we get another film saying the same thing – only with the added spice of juvenile direction, rank amateurish editing and absolutely stunning non-acting.

David Engelbach screenplays with a 1st-grader’s concept of story structure, while Michael Winner directs like a man possessed by demons – demons who don’t know how to direct.

Five punks kidnap and rape Kersey’s daughter (Robin Sherwood), who wasn’t doing too hot to begin with, seemingly left retarded after her experience with Goldblum’s freaks in DEATH WISH, institutionalized and speechless – now raped, and subsequently jumping out a window to kill herself, but more importantly, to get the inane plot going.

Architect Paul Kersey, between trying to express grief convincingly and adding expensive doorways to his client’s building plans, decides to hunt down the killers, while keeping his night killings a secret from his new blond interviewer girlfriend, Geri (real-life spouse Jill Ireland). After a night of sexy vigilante thrills, he comes home dripping blood from a big gash in his arm; you would think this would curtail his night of sexy girlfriend thrills, but one quick wrap later and he’s spending the night. One wonders how timidly she makes love if she never notices a bandage the size of a bedsheet clotting a gaping wound on her manfriend’s body.

There are no interesting methods to flush out the punks or chasing down clues to their whereabouts; Kersey finds them by simply wandering the streets in a docker’s cap, hunkered down in some vain attempt to look incognito. Of course, surprisingly, he finds them – or else the movie would consist of following an old guy around Hollywood streets doing nothing, which is what most of the movie is anyway. When he finds them, he shoots them. Usually he’ll say something cutting and incisive like, “Goodbye,” but mostly he keeps his thoughts to himself, so as not to interrupt the flow of non-action.

Jeff Goldblum was the extra in DEATH WISH who would rise to stardom; here, watch for Laurence Fishburne as one of the punks.

Vincent Gardenia so loved being a doughy detective in DEATH WISH, he plays the same guy here.

Of all the disbelief we are asked to suspend in this slow-moving sludge, the greatest is the police response time to high crime districts. In this magical version of Los Angeles, police arrive at a crime scene ten seconds after shots are fired; and after Kersey murders one of the punks, it is reported on the news twenty minutes after the act!

Music composed by Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin’s guitarist/warlock, and we can hear decidedly Page-ian flourishes in the “gang” segments (Theremin sound effects, and bowing a guitar – as he so uniquely demonstrates on THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME); and he’s not doing a bad job with the regular orchestra either. The most amusing aspect of Page’s participation is that he is scoring a movie featuring “punks” – rebellious rock and roll youth – and at the time of this movie, he was one of the greatest proponents of rebellious rock and roll youth.

After DEATH WISH (1974), the rest of the series (up to and including DEATH WISH V: THE FACE OF DEATH, 1994) only served to sully the mighty reputation of Charles Bronson, even as the series simultaneously banked on his past reputation as an iconic action man (THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, THE DIRTY DOZEN, RED SUN).

DEATH WISH II ends as lamely as it played, with Kersey’s architect boss asking him if he’ll be free to attend a party tomorrow night, and Kersey saying with a wink-wink to the audience, “Of course I’m free. What else would I be doing?”

Uh… hunting down a punk like Jimmy Page?

END

DEATH WISH II (Feb 1982)
Director: Michael Winner.
Writers: David Engelbach, Brian Garfield.
Music: Jimmy Page.
Starring: Charles Bronson, Jill Ireland, Vincent Gardenia, J.D. Cannon, Anthony Franciosa, Ben Frank, Robin Sherwood, Silvana Gallardo, Paul Lambert, Thomas F. Duffy, Laurence Fishburne.

imdb
Word Count: 660 No. 618

Spread the love