This is not to say that it's entirely correct to draw a connection between Andy Griffith's character Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes, a charismatic, blackly cynical drifter who stumbles into national fame and even political power through a lucrative television career, and the real-life Donald Trump, a wealthy ghoul from an old-money clan of virulent racists who leveraged his existing wealth and fame into a two-time presidency. Rhodes, the loudmouthed, gravely-voiced subject of A Face in the Crowd, is in truth a lot more like Elvis Presley, or Will Rogers Sr., using a folksy, down-home persona (importantly, a white Southern one) to appeal to the common man, white and black, all in the name of getting them to give him all their money. But I namedrop Trump because the one thing all these men have in common is their use of media to achieve power.
Let's step back a bit. A Face in the Crowd tells the story of "Lonesome" Rhodes, a drifter with no real past, whose charming persona, musical talent and propensity for funny, folksy anecdotes gets him noticed by a local radio station, which gives him his own show. Before long, he manages to use pointed political critique and social commentary to leverage his little Arkansas radio show into a Memphis-area TV show, then into sponsorship deals (including a truly bananas, ahead-of-its-time montage revolving around an advertising campaign for a snake-oil product called Vitajex) and finally into a nationally-broadcast television program, watched by millions every week, and a consultancy with a politician's presidential campaign. All the while, his authoritarian tendencies and his narcissism begin to show through more and more; in the end, he gets his comeuppance, when his jilted lover Marcia (who discovered him in an Arkansas drunk tank to begin with) exposes him on national TV and he loses credibility with his audience. Turns out, calling your audience a bunch of slobs and idiots tends to turn people off.
In the context of the late 1950s when this film was released, A Face in the Crowd is a film about television, a relatively new medium that was fast growing into the most powerful method of reaching people (much to the chagrin of newspapers, radio, and the film industry.) By 1957, television had become the opiate of the masses, a device from which truth and lies became indistinguishable from one another. While much has changed in the television industry between the 1950s and now — many shows did their own commercials, a practice since revived by YouTubers — its absolute power to influence has remained the same, even as it competes with the internet. Rhodes is undone the same way he's made famous: Marcia secretly records him. In that Arkansas drunk tank, she left her tape recorder running despite being asked to turn it off. In the television studio, as the credits rolled at the end of Rhodes' show over a live feed of Rhodes and the show's cast of stereotypes talking silently in the background, Marcia turns the microphones back on, letting the nation hear just how Rhodes really felt about his audience. (It's not quite Access Hollywood tape bad, but it's bad.) The consequences are swift and brutal: his sponsorships pull out, his show is probably canceled, and he's lost the trust of most of his audience. (That's how you know it's fiction: consequences rarely come to real-life grifters.) This then reveals the power of television, an image of television as a kind of all-powerful deity. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.
But in the broader context of American politics over the last seventy years, A Face in the Crowd resonates for an entirely different reason. Because we've seen acts like Rhodes' before, haven't we? Forget Trump for a minute: our media landscape is awash in grifters, from religious charlatans like Jim Bakker and those who followed in his footsteps, to politicians who gin up country boy credentials to hide their thoroughly middle or upperclass backgrounds, to dipshits who foment outrage on the internet for clicks. After Charlie Kirk died, people who had no idea who he was a week prior were glazing him as a devout family man and bemoaning "political violence," ignoring the very violence his own speech regularly caused, peppered as it was with virulent antisemitism, racism and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. Rhodes is no white supremacist or misogynist, at least on paper: he demonstrates an understanding of the women's issues of the day, and he raised thousands for a desperate black woman whose family was left homeless after a fire. But watch how he subtly blocks her from the camera; watch how he chases every skirt he sees, including flying a 17-year-old baton twirler down to Mexico to marry her (while telling Marcia, whom he'd already proposed to, that he was flying down there to finalize his divorce from another woman he'd neglected to tell her about.) Watch how he never stops drinking; watch how he manipulates people, watch how his politics grow more and more conservative, culminating in his ending his show with platitudes like "the family that prays together, stays together." Watch how he grows so egomaniacal, so needing of attention and adulation, that he installs an applause machine in his own fucking penthouse. Watch how he throws people away when he doesn't need them anymore, the way he humiliates Marcia over and over, until she finally destroys the monster she inadvertently created.
Just a few years after making this film, Andy Griffith would develop an image of wholesomeness with the TV sitcom The Andy Griffith Show that stuck with him the rest of his career. If all you know about him was his role as a personable small-town cop, A Face in the Crowd might shock you; as with Angela Lansbury and The Manchurian Candidate, or Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler (another film about television's power to manipulate) you might never look at Griffith the same way again.
Funny, how TV shapes perceptions like that, huh?
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