A grifter and a charmer, Rhodes is sleeping off a hangover in a rural jail when a local radio producer (Patricia Neal, doing that hard-but-vulnerable thing she did so well) sticks a microphone in his face.
Griffith, who came from nightclubs and the stage and had no resume as a dramatic actor in 1957, plays Lonesome Rhodes, a drifter who stumbles into national prominence thanks to the demagogic power of the then-young medium. What’s doubly delicious about this is, A Face In The Crowd is a cautionary tale about the power of - Anyone? Anyone? Yes: Television. The facts that Griffith played a bad guy in his first film role, and that both the performance and the movie, Elia Kazan’s 1957 A Face In The Crowd, are largely overlooked today - these are testaments to TV’s power to swamp any cultural phenomena that have the poor judgment to get in its way.
ANDY GRIFFITH MOVIES TV
Griffith’s long TV career effectively effaced a film debut that, fifty years later, is so vivid and visceral that it startles with every viewing. It also took away, and it’s here that the medium shows its muscle in a really astounding way. Griffith had one TV role that was merely successful and one that was almost archetypical.
If for any reason you doubt the power of television, consider the long career of Andy Griffith, who died this week at 86.
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