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

Ziggy played for time / Jiving us that we were voodoo…

The Film that Moved the Earth.

In 1951, in the shadow of the Cold War, in the grip of McCarthyism, as America slid into the Atomic Age, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL was just another stanky B-Movie science fiction thriller with a sanctimonious message of the human race on the edge of doom. Somehow, it rose above the engine pit and is now regarded as a classic.

Port

Classic in intent; execution, still stanky B-Movie.

A spaceship (nee, “flying saucer”) lands in Washington amidst widespread dismay and theramins twoinging. Two alien beings emerge, Klaatu (Michael Rennie, doing his Charlton Heston Lite) and Gort (played by tall Lock Martin), an eight-foot metal robot (who looks suspiciously like foam rubber). Klaatu’s message to Earth is simple: “it is no concern of ours how you run your own planet, but if you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned out cinder.”

McCarthy’s gonna LOVE this guy…

Klaatu’s message is only delivered in the last five minutes of the movie, where we discover there is life on many other worlds and that Klaatu’s race regard themselves as police of the cosmos, sending out their metal foam rubber drogues like Gort, who “at the first sign of violence, act automatically against the aggressor.”

With violence. So much for turning the other cheek; so much for peace begetting peace; so much for benevolent superior beings…

Though there are many unintentional Christ allegories throughout this tale – Klaatu’s message of peace; Klaatu going undercover as “Mr. Carpenter”; Klaatu dying and being “resurrected” by Gort – this Orwellian dance of paradoxy was not one of them. The main question raised when a civilization is forced into behaving under threat of obliteration is the same question I always ponder of this civilization and, in particular, religions that threaten damnation: Would you behave if there was NO threat? And what does this say about your vaunted “goodness” if it is only to avoid penalty or hell or jail or Klaatu?

Directed by Robert Wise (who would go on to direct THE SOUND OF MUSIC, 1965, and STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE, 1979), I think what set this movie apart from the hundreds of 1950s atomic-themed B-fiascos that ended with the caveat “The decision rests with you” is the non-provincial nature of Klaatu’s message. Klaatu insists he will NOT meet with any world leader exclusively; that includes the president of the United States. Of course, this “insult” twists the narcissistic panties of America, but widens the audience for the film. Eventually, Klaatu decides to meet “intelligent” people – all the scientists he can muster. To prove his power, to bring them to the table, he makes the Earth “stand still” – stops everything electric, stops all the traffic in the streets, the trains on their tracks, yet keeps hospitals and necessities running. We never find out how Klaatu makes the Earth stand still, but we figure it has something to do with him being wicked at algebra.

Klaatu’s objectivity in NOT singling out America as the Earth’s spokespeople elevated the film’s message and struck that “classic” world chord.

Unfortunately, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL has not dated well (which is why, I presume, some meathead felt the need to remake it in 2008. But that’s another tale…) Social morés and filmic techniques have progressed so far that the film’s old-world execution and 1950 Amish mentality is cringeworthy.

I urge you – like I urged the KING KONG 1933 retroheads – to rewatch the film, but hold onto your… hats – This movie is from a time when white men wore hats more religiously than Jews wear yamulkes; from an age when the pointy bra was the weapon of choice for single women; when rear projection was the new CGI; when dating couples in their 40s were considered “crazy kids in love”; when everyone addressed each Mr and Mrs and kept their ties tight and girdles tighter to deter the opposite sex from unholy acts of bad thoughts; when the military protected a spaceship landing field with two inept guards; when people clustered around the radio for their news, drove cars as big as boats, lathered Brylcreem through their hair (to keep their hats on?) and wore their pants so high it chafed their nipples… it would be hideous kinky if it wasn’t so unwatchable cringy…

Two doctors (at Walter Reed military hospital, no less) marvel at Klaatu’s life expectancy being 130, because his “medicine is that much more advanced” – but medicine has nothing to do with life span! How do you account for the one-afternoon life span of a mayfly compared to the century-span of a tortoise? It’s not the superior medical program tortoises have over humans, doctor geniuses – it’s called METABOLISM. Discussing life expectancy while lighting up cigarettes! Then another doctor, befuddled at Klaatu’s healing salve, laments, “I don’t know whether to just get drunk or give up the practice of medicine.” Those are the only two options? Nothing’s changed at Walter Reed…

Unwatchable.

And – in that Golden Age of Superheroes (1938-1950s) – Gort’s fashion statement of tiny metal superhero undies over his metal spandex leggings does not go unnoticed. By female metal men with severe girdles and pointy bras.

In one of the inanest scenes this side of THIS ISLAND EARTH (1955), Gort carries the “love interest” (Patricia Neal, who shows no “love” – not even to her 45-year-old “boyfriend,” Hugh Marlowe – and therefore holds none of our interest) into Klaatu’s spaceship. She fulfills no function within, does nothing to further the plot, doesn’t even get anal-probed (which would have loosened that girdle enough for a man to get a finger under that pointy bra with a chisel), and simply walks out later, unconcerned. We realize Gort’s act was simply to comply with 1950s film poster protocol of Alien Carrying Earth Woman. Poster achieved. Back to the kitchen, woman!

Judge this film not on its superficial message (preachy messages of doom were a staple of 1950s sci-fi cinema); judge it not on its “timeliness” (there is always the threat of unmanageable war – we’re looking at you, Dubya!); judge it on the one point that even Roger Ebert misunderstood: that humans killing each other does not concern the cosmos, but that if our weapons were turned outwards, it WOULD concern other life forms. THAT – is a message for generations. THAT – is why this film is a classic, even if most humans are too provincial to comprehend the concept and even if the film doesn’t quite understand what it’s talking about itself, humans not having conquered space yet at the film’s release.

Klaatu also presages the future insane President Bush’s governing style: “I am fearful when I see people substitute fear for reason.”

On the one question which the film should have easily disqualified – the question of deities – the film-makers bowed to gutless studio standards. When the shot Klaatu is resurrected (the blood on his jacket looking like tomato sauce even in black and white), he explains his “born again” state, and makes about as much sense as any religion: “Only the Almighty Spirit has power over life and death” …You mean there IS a god, overseeing all the alien worlds and taking their weird-looking spirit forms up unto his capacious bosom?

And he wears tiny metal superhero undies.

END