A Face in the Crowd (Newtown; Warner) is the sort of cure that almost makes the disease desirable, even when the disease is as painful as the commercial phoniness that currently afflicts some parts of U.S. culture. The doctor in this case is Elia Kazan, a well-known specialist in social disorders who made On the Waterfront and Baby Doll and has directed three of Tennessee Williams' plays. Unhappily Kazan does not seem to know the first thing about a satiric operation. As Lady Mary Wortley Montagu explained the technique: "Satire should, like a polished razor keen/ Wound with a touch that's scarcely felt or seen." She also described Kazan's method: "Thine is an oyster knife, that hacks and hews;/ The rage, but not the talent, to abuse."
Rage is Kazan's undoing. He hacks and hews with such ill-considered fury that the patient soon becomes a mere victim and the satire falls to pieces. The victim (Andy Griffith) is a big-time TV entertainer, a professional yokel. Behind his hawg-trough grin stands a greedy and brutal hog, but the public cannot see the phony character for the microphone manner. "Shucks,'' stutters Lonesome Rhodes, as he strim-strams on his li'l ole git-tar, "Ah'm jes' a country boy." And soon his public stretches as far as his I can see.
Following the Budd Schulberg story on which the film is based, Kazan follows the great man from a jailhouse to a penthouse, and the trip is sometimes fun. Kazan takes time to inspect such scenic wonders of TV as the reason-why-sell, the inverse commercial, the collective think, the built-in crowd. He also provides some hilarious examples of TV shoptalk ("Great show. J.B." "Ye-e-es, I think it had size"). And all the while he is sinking the oyster knife into his victim, who loves nothing in the world so much as power—above all the power to make people crawl.
So far, soso. The film has moved too slowly, and Andy Griffith in his first movie role has been uneven and never quite convincing; but Patricia Neal has provided a sensitive study of what it is like to be in love with a hokum Yokum. And then the villain hits the top. He goes hog-wild, and so does Director Kazan. Instead of keeping the menace down to life size, the script permits its corn-fed psychopath to sphacelate through the U.S. social body like some malignant growth, until he actually threatens to take over the Federal Government. As the driving force of a fascist-tinged political movement. Lonesome Rhodes is promised a Cabinet post as Secretary for National Morale. But by this time the moviegoer is not believing a word of it, and he may well be wondering if Director Kazan, like the villain of his piece, has not somehow mistaken his public for a bunch of "stupid slobs."