CineFile Video

“The voice of grassroots wisdom.”

Andy Griffith in his first and finest role as Lonesome Rhodes, the jailhouse drunk turned popular balladeer turned political demagogue of “A Face in the Crowd.” Here, the ravenously ambitious Rhodes has leveraged his fame for his own “Face the Nation” – “The Lonesome Rhodes Cracker Barrel Show,” a “Hee-Haw” prototype staged on a general store set with patented rustics to curry favor and soak up some raw power.

While writer Walter Matthau and producer Patricia Neal watch helplessly from their barstools, Rhodes plays host to Senator Worthington Fuller – rechristened “Curley” for his audience.

“I wish you’d give me the real cotton-picking truth about how you feel on the subject of more and more and more Social Security,” says Griffith’s curdled populist.

“I’m glad you asked me that question, Lonesome,” says the Senator. “I’d say that people today are obsessed –”

“Huh?” interrupts Rhodes.

“I mean, real gone for security,” says Fuller. “They want protection, coddling, from the cradle to the grave. I say that weakens the moral fiber. Why, Daniel Boone wasn’t looking for unemployment insurance and old-age pension. All he needed was his axe and his gun, and a chance to hew a living out of the forest with his own hands.”

George W. Bush couldn’t have said it any better – and doesn’t on a regular basis, still trotting out the selfsame schtick five decades later.

Scripted by Budd Schulberg from his novella “Your Arkansas Traveler,” Lonesome Rhodes was a cross between Sen. Joseph McCarthy and Arthur Godfrey, a folksy ukelele-wielding variety host whose inner fascist slipped out when he fired singer Julius LaRosa live on-air without warning for missing the show’s compulsory dance lessons. (Will Rogers was also an alleged model.) But it’s Bush who comes quickest to mind, the affable confidence man barely able to contain what writer Mark Crispin Miller calls “the great glowering Nixon inside.”

As it so happens, I had a chance to query Schulberg, now 92, on this very topic – at a rare L.A. appearance in Beverly Hills last year. As recounted in the L.A. Weekly, I praised the film and posed the question from the floor, “Having lived this long, do you feel like you accidentally scripted the current President of the United States?”

He took a moment before answering. “I think I might have been prescient about a few other occupants of the White House as well,” he said.

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