A Face in the Crowd: American Character

The preproduction research Kazan and Schulberg undertook extended beyond location scouting to investigate the shamelessly intertwined relationships between advertisers, entertainers, and politicians. They went to Washington to talk with people in politics about television’s impact on campaigning, and sat in on creative meetings at the Madison Avenue ad agency that handled the Lipton tea account. Kazan remembered being amused by the admen’s serious debate over how to visually represent the word brisk in commercials. “The discussions were really ludicrous; you could hardly keep a straight face at them,” Kazan said. “But as well as the ridiculous side, you could feel the intense, neurotic pressure they all worked under.” This research found its way into the film in the form of a commercial for a product called Vitajex, a pill composed solely of dextrose, aspirin, and caffeine but hawked as if it were Viagra. 

In the commercial, beautiful, scantily clad women croon about the benefits of the pills, then a pinup girl sits up in bed and clasps a comically large Vitajex bottle to her ample bosom. This miracle product promises its users virility and preys on men’s insecurities, while the strapping Rhodes assures them that it certainly works for him. It’s a vivid illustration of the way the cons of the modern consumer-political landscape are most readily swallowed by those most insecure in their own identities. (Consider that a 2018 New York University study showed a correlation between men whose online searches include terms like “erectile dysfunction,” “hair loss,” and “testosterone,” and those who vote for swaggering alpha figures.) Like the faux cowboy George W. Bush and the showbiz “folk” hero Ronald Reagan before him, Rhodes isn’t selling results so much as a false sense of security.

Schulberg’s inspirations for Rhodes were homespun politicians and entertainers like Huey Long and Will Rogers, but especially radio and television host Arthur Godfrey. In his heyday in the forties and early fifties, Godfrey had been the consummate pitchman. His monologues were extemporaneous, meandering but endearing, and he projected for his audience an image of veracity, primarily by frequently assuring the folks at home that they could in fact trust him. (It never stops being surprising how effective this tactic of convincing one’s followers of a claim simply by repeating it over and over can be.)

Schulberg was fascinated by Godfrey, who somehow sustained his career even after his popularity waned as a result of a series of embarrassing on- and off-air incidents that belied his wholesome image. Matthau’s Mel Miller, a kind of avatar for Schulberg, caps the film with a speech that reflects the writer’s mistrustful view of such a man, conceding that Rhodes will likely be back on television eventually, even after being abandoned by his fans. “People’s memories aren’t too long,” Mel says. This may be the hardest-hitting insight in the film, that Americans love a rehabilitation story. It helps explain how a businessman who has done nothing but fail at business could come to star in a reality television show that claims to teach success and business savvy. Or how a loony ex–vice presidential candidate like Sarah Palin could parlay a sound defeat into a career as a media personality, or how male entertainers who’ve finally been disgraced after decades of sexually harassing women could be given op-ed-column inches in which to plead their cases mere months after their ostracism. We crave a good comeback.

One also can’t help but wonder whether Kazan and Schulberg were contemplating their own public falls from grace in the making of this film. Both had testified in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (Schulberg in 1951, Kazan in 1952), naming names of friends and former collaborators who had belonged to the Communist Party, and had seen their reputations and relationships suffer as a result. Their creative partnership grew out of the pain and the professional vacuum that came from being shunned by people they had worked with in the past; Kazan reached out to Schulberg, and they began collaborating on Schulberg’s script about dockworkers in New York City, undertaking an intensive research process that anticipated what they would do for A Face in the Crowd. They met with a longshoreman who had stood up to the criminal mob that controlled the dockworkers and their union and had then named names in testimony before the commission charged with investigating the corruption that governed the docks. In using his story to inform Marlon Brando’s character in On the Waterfront, writer and director saw a way to make a film with a liberal and proworker but anticorruption, antisecrecy message, which many at the time and since have naturally read as a defense of their own HUAC testimonies. 

But in its own way, perhaps, A Face in the Crowd can be read as a less defiant apologia, or at least an illumination of how deeply individual lives can be affected by the influence of television—the same medium that had enabled Senator Joseph McCarthy to intensify the red scare that had caused such upheaval in Kazan’s and Schulberg’s careers (and ruin for so many others) is what allows Lonesome Rhodes’s ego to run amok on such a monumental scale. The movie was not positively received or reviewed, and Neal would later say she felt that wasn’t because people didn’t like it but because they didn’t want to see Kazan and Schulberg succeed. Despite the film’s satirical and over-the-top elements, many critics now consider it one of Kazan’s most personal works. With its pinpointing and examination of such a peculiar fault in our country’s DNA, perhaps it’s also the most American of his films—even more so than America America (1963), the story of a poor Greek man who dreams of immigrating to the United States, or the director’s final movie, the F. Scott Fitzgerald adaptation The Last Tycoon (1976), a drama consumed with the ins and outs and trivialities of Hollywood. Interestingly, Kazan later said he’d come to feel that he and Schulberg had made Rhodes too comically evil, in their depiction of him as a megalomaniac lulling himself to sleep in a high-rise penthouse with the raucous applause of an imaginary audience.

To call A Face in the Crowd prescient wouldn’t quite be accurate. That would suggest that the American phenomenon Schulberg’s script and Kazan’s film capture hadn’t been with us from the beginning. This is a country where two-bit entertainers have frequently joined the political class, buoyed by name recognition and charisma alone, and it’s perhaps the only developed nation in the world where this happens so often. Americans today might like to think we are on to bilkers and crooks like Rhodes, that we can see a con for a con. In 2010, Neal sat down at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood for a postscreening discussion of A Face in the Crowd. The audience was asked: “How many of you seeing Lonesome Rhodes on TV would trust him or be drawn to him?” The response was only a smattering of applause. Later that year, season 10 of The Apprentice premiered on NBC.