A Face in the Crowd

A Face in the Crowd (Elia Kazan, 1957) The cyclical rise and fall of media pundits makes this prescient diatribe against the dangers of television consistently fresh and relevant.  Sure, it might have been talking about Arthur Godfrey, but it fits the bill for "The Glenn Beck Story," too.  A rube gets built up as a "voice of the people," and then, given money, power and a platform turns into a little  cathode-ray god, his TV-face just being make-up over a manipulative withered soul drunk for power...or love...or advantage over his neighbor.  It's why MSNBC's Keith Olbermann always refers to Beck as "Lonesome Rhodes"—that's the "aw-shucks" nom-de-tube of the character in the movie—but it could be any of the sensations over the years, like Morton Downey, Jr. (Remember him? Good, if you don't), briefly, Jerry Springer, or any of the kiss-and-televangelists who've grabbed the spot-light, only to have scandal take it back, shine it on them, and see them scurry back, cockroach-like into the wood-work ...until they think people have forgotten.

So, on this day of the repeat performance of the "Glenn Beck-Broke" Tour slamming into theaters tonight, let's take a look back at A Face in the Crowd...even though the story is still being played out ad nauseum by Beck and his future issue in an endless cycle of hucksterism and snake-oil.

It's the dark side of a Frank Capra "everyman" movie.  Capra always flirted with fascism in those films, but Budd Schulberg's screenplay tackles it head-on: Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal) discovers an Arkansas drunk, Larry Rhodes (Andy Griffith, never more brilliant than he is here) in a small-town jail, and coerces him to sing on a local radio station.  He develops a following, and soon wins a sponsored television gig in Memphis, then moves up to New York.  His folksy homilies and willingness to make fun of his sponsors endears him to the public at large, and soon his influence begins to spread, attracting political machines who want to attach their candidates to "a man of the people."  In a time before "red states" and "blue states" divided rural and urban political boundaries, it was still a goal to reach the "real" America in the heartland.  While Rhodes gains his following, he also starts to spend his capital in his sequestered private life: he begins an affair with Jeffries, then throws her under the tour bus for a cheerleader.  At this point, Rhodes thinks he's Teflon, and nothing can besmirch his reputation. 

But, he who lives by the sword, dies by it.  A microphone deliberately unmuted shows his true colors to a public fed only the rouged mask, and "Lonesome" Rhodes begins the quicker descent down the hill of notoriety.  No homily can save him.  No tears.  No hysterics.  No more.  Hopefully, he has some gold stashed away.

It's a cautionary tale...for everybody.  Edward R. Murrow not only suggested television could be "merely wires and lights in a box," but that it could also be a weapon.  And in a world where to exploit can lead to success, it's primed and cocked.  It's just an instrument, at the beck and call of those who would use it to reach into our homes and our hearts.  The message of A Face in the Crowd, although a might heavy-handed in presentation at times, still applies today, just as it did in the past, and just as surely as it will in the future. 

The Fountainhead

"The Fountainhead" (King Vidor, 1949) Ayn Rand's ideological tome about the individual's right to see their vision through without compromise is its own worst argument as a movie. Her stance—what we now call "objectivism," a nice oblique term—makes perfect sense for writers and painters, but in collaborative media like, say, architecture—and the movies, despite the auteur theory—it just seems like impractical hooey. And elitist fascist hooey, at that. Elitist because Rand can't have her way without establishing an adversarial relationship with what she churlishly calls "the mob," the very "mob" that is the core of democracy. The anti-communist Rand looks down her nose at the one thing that separated democracy from autocratic rule—the opinion of her "mob." I guess autocracies aren't so bad when you're the autocrat (which sounds suspiciously like a politburo, either way the shallowness of thought is breath-taking).

Now, writers take their chances and only have themselves to blame if their books don't sell (that is, if you leave out complicating factors like publishers, press-agents, and a good cover designer). But a writer for the collaborative art of film must interact with a lot of artisans (who you'd think also have their right to a vision in their craft) to make it to the screen.*

Not so Ayn Rand. Her contract—a good one—stated that not a word of her screenplay was to be changed, excised, or tampered with. Once she finished her own final draft, it was set in stone.

Of course, a writer's vision is passed through many filters in the movies, the art directors, the cinematographers, the director, the actors, etc. Interpretation of "The Word" is all that's left of movie-making after the writing. It seems a little myopic to make that request as it might apply to the dialogue, but the stage directions, descriptions, everything excepting dialogue is always open to interpretation by "those others."

King Vidor had been an established director, starting his career in silent pictures, and, being there at the beginning, contributed to the "language" of film more than most directors working in 1949. He knew what worked on film and what didn't (or else why had he been working for so long?). And yet, when he tried to shorten Rand's rambling court-room speech, he was shot down. What about his film-maker's vision? Certainly his arguments and expertise in film-making had more credence than Ms. Rand's.**

And so, we have what could have been an interesting film with a compelling take on the world that is ham-strung by the purple prose written by its author, done in a style that recalls the locked-in-concrete work of Leni Riefenstahl. Her philosophy in context is merely pretense and an apologia for shooting one's self in the foot in the practical world of film-making or other collaborative media.

But it's all surface tension, anyway. In "The Fountainhead," her characters have no motivation than what Rand thinks is important, which is her ideology, even though their actions in particular circumstances seem to run counter to their ideals. Look, I'm with her on architecture—if I see one more greco-roman portico on a McMansion, I may go live in a yurt, but it wouldn't compel me to shoot myself in the head over it, or dynamite it...or, for that matter, fly a plane into it.

But, like the bear in the joke said, "This isn't about the hunting, is it?" Rand's arguments bog down in practical real-world terms in architecture, but one senses there are other issues at play here. The film is one big "edifice" complex, with throbbing jack-hammers and impressive erections (including "the biggest one in the world!") That the big clinch between Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal is a rape scene complete with ignoring of resistance or saying "no," and then Neal's character, Dominique, runs off, marries another man, whom she doesn't love (Raymond Massey as a publishing king-pin in a performance that can only be called "animatronic") and then races to do architect Roarke's bidding at the drop of a housing project. It doesn't speak well for the character's self-respect, consistency, or even mental health, qualities that one would expect, all things being egomaniacally equal, in the Rand-world.***

I'm all for keeping what's yours for yourself.

But I wish Ayn Rand had kept her neuroses to herself (by the way, despite being the one who adapted it, she is said to have "disliked the movie from beginning to end." I guess you can't accuse her of having bad taste or being that thing she loathed—a bad critic.)

* Perhaps Rand is the best writer for radio. One of my favorite stories about writers is the one about Rod Serling who was asked which medium he preferred to write for, radio or television. His answer was writerly-complicated: "When I write 'there's a castle on the hill' for television, I turn the script in and if they want to keep the castle on the hill, they work it into the budget and then the Art Director designs the castle on the hill. His designs are given to a drafter who makes up the plans which are given to the carpenters and masons who make the castle on the hill, then it's painted and detailed and set decorators put in the flora for the hill, and when it's all done I've got a castle on the hill. One castle on the hill."

"But, when I write 'There's a castle on the hill' for radio, the announcer reads it and suddenly I've got a million imagined castles on hills. And they're all different."

** Supposedly, though, Jack Warner, a conservative and whose company was paying for "The Fountainhead," trimmed the speech a bit, because he didn't want to lose money. Rand squawked, but apparently didn't blow up Warner Brothers. See, there's the Real World and then there's someone's ideological Fantasy.

*** Things turn so abnormally fraught that the film falls into that sub-genre of drama so histrionic that the wife and I call "Why doesn't everyone get a good night's sleep and start afresh in the morning?"

The Daze After "The Day The Earth Stood Still"

The Day The Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951) Iconic sci-fi pic that managed to be just strange enough to be spiritual without having to explain itself. Edmund H. North's script (adapted from the 1940 Harry Bates story "Farewell to the Master") just assumed that any advanced civilization's technology would seem like magic to us (ala Clarke's Third Law). It's anti-nuke theme was somewhat off-set by it's Christ allegory under-pinnings: a human-appearing being from above comes to Earth with a "message," is killed and resurrected to give mankind a lesson in humility. That the alien--Klaatu (Michael Rennie)--walks among us under the guise of a "Mr. Carpenter" just nails the significance home.

Right from the get-go, The Day The Earth Stood Still announces its intention with a "spooky" theremin-laced score (by the brilliant Bernard Herrmann), quite at odds with its message of peace. Wise shows a global humanity surrounded by its current technology (radio, television, radar) spreading the news of an invader from space, which lands in the Mall area of a tourist-clogged Washington D.C. in Spring. Phalanxed by a wall of tanks and military might (with a larger crowd of tourists behind it) the alien presence reveals itself and is shot by a panicky soldier for its trouble. Before you can say "Kent State," the alien is taken to Walter Reed to be treated, observed and questioned, and the formal Klaatu--patient, curious, but with a hint of passive condescension--does his own analysis, escaping from the hospital and blending with the populace as "Mr. Carpenter"--taking a room at a boarding house, becoming involved with a widowed secretary (Patricia Neal)--it IS the '50's, after all--and her son, seeing humanity first-hand.

Meanwhile, his Enforcer, Gort, a lumbering, laser-cyclopsed, soft-metal robot stands guard over the saucer, turning his evil eye on any hint of aggression, without any regard to how much of the GNP was flushed to make those tanks. If Gort could laugh when he turned on his eye-light, he'd probably do it with glee.

There are so many small details that delight: Patricia Neal's uncommonly common working Mom, with a wary eye towards Mr. Carpenter--there's not even the hint of romance there; Sam Jaffe's cameo as Einstein stand-in Dr. Barnhardt, looking at his business-suited stranger visitor from another planet with eyes of dazzled wonder; the whole design of the thing that has so permeated our culture with sleek silver surfaces that fold in and out of each other seamlessly; "Gort, Klaatu Barada Nikto!" which, indicative of the race's parsimoniousness, roughly translates to: "Robot, take Klaatu's body back to the space-ship and repair whatever damage has been done to it, bring him back to life, and oh! while you're at it, don't turn me into a smoking pile of ash, thank you very much*"--talk about "Three Little Words!"; Robert Wise's unerring sense of staging and for putting the camera in the exact, most effective place without making you aware that it's the most effective place. Wise is always given short-shrift as a director, implying a yeomanlike sensibility rather than an artistic one, but the Man Who Edited Citizen Kane also conceived beautiful, eerie, creepy shots like this:

Thanks to Glenn Kenny of "Some Came Running," who reminded me **

The Day the Earth Stood Still is a classic film—a time-capsule, of a kind—from a different time and place and space that reminds, yes, with great power comes great responsibilty--but there's always someone more powerful, who might take yours away, and make you stop and smell the fall-out.

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"Everything New (Testament) is Old Again"

So why remake it? Well, it's a question that Klaatu's United Planets couldn't negotiate--and Gort's Galactic Police Force would probably give you the eye. But the agent of Keanu Reeves saw a poster of the original and dollar signs swam into his head and here, we have it. And Scott Derrickson (who put a different head-spin on "The Exorcism of Emily Rose") thought he could turn it into a warning about global warming, and Reeves thought that, though the original Klaatu preached peace, he did so threatening force, which he found "fascist."

Sigh.***

That sounds noble in thought (if a tad simplistic). On-screen, it's a different matter entirely.

Because it's a "re-imagining" (rather than "a remake"), there is no "flying saucer," but a cloudy, spacy "orb" (all the better to remind you of the planet, but I kept wondering what kept it in place), and rather than the military, scientists are in the front line (with Princeton astro-biologist Helen Benson, played by Jennifer Connelly, as the point-person). The military is back-up.
The scenario starts the same: Land-Bang-End up in Hospital. And there things start to change. The original Klaatu had no special powers. Gort was the "muscle" (and here, the robot is 20 feet tall, gun-metal gray in color, and a completely CG construct--it's actually simplified from the original's design--and, as with the first Gort, its unreadability makes it a genuinely creepy sight). Keanu Reeves' Klaatu has a nasty way with bio-feedback that does damage. So much for pacifism. But, this Klaatu isn't Christ-in-a-business-suit. This one goes back a few chapters, back to the Old Testament. Particularly those parts dealing with Noah and Moses. The threat is environmental, rather than nuclear, and to sustain one of "the handful of planets that can support life," Keanu-Klaatu's United Planets are thinking of a little Silent Spring Cleaning of the life-form doing the most damage. Good thing he doesn't carry around a cook-book!

The following section is SPOILER material, so if you want to be surprised how it ends—if you care—don't highlight the next paragraph which, like the Earth, gets blacked out:

That scouring consists of billions of nanite-sized metal locusts (why they have to specifically look like insects, I have no idea, but I'd guess it has something to do with why Klaatu's named "Mr. Carpenter" in the first one). So, this "plague" starts doing its damage, devouring metal of all kinds, sports-arenas and such, and one can only hope that it can distinguish "green" technology, like solar panels and wind-generators, from the other kinds, but I suspect not--that might involve thinking! Keatu, or Klaanu, or whatever you want to call him, decides at the last minute that because humans have the capacity for change, they maybe, just maybe, could save their environment, so he sacrifices himself sabotaging the plague, leaving humans with no electricity, no technology, and presumably the resolve to stop the global warming crisis with, as a much wiser alien once inventoried, "stone knives and bear-skins." Thanks, Kleatu or Kono, or whatever your name is, thanks a lot. Who's gonna pick up these continents of dead nanites corrupting the soil, Mr. "Ecology?" And they thought the first one gave off mixed signals?


Keanu Reeves has the most limited range of any actor who hasn't suffered a stroke, but he does have two specialties at which he excels: endearingly stupid, or robotic. The latter serves him well, as in Speed, the portions of The Matrix when he was portrayed by pixels, and this film. His strange visitor from another planet is a nice piece of craft, slightly more human than Jeff Bridges' "Starman," and extremely efficient in his movements--when he turns his head to look you right in the eye, you'd better take him seriously. He's quite effective in the role. Jennifer Connelly delivers the techno-babble expertly (as she did in "Hulk"), but she really doesn't have much more to do than Patricia Neal did, as the role is basically reduced to "concerned mother." As the child she's concerned about, Jaden Smith at least doesn't fall into the "predictable child" category. He finds different ways of doing things than the "stock-child" role. Kathy Bates is too good for her role of Secretary of Defense, Jon Hamm, of "Mad Men," doesn't really separate himself from the pack, but Robert Knepper does a fine job as a Colonel in charge of trying to stop a tidal wave with a tea-cup. It's always great to see cameo's by James Hong, and John Cleese, who plays Prof. Barnhardt in this version.*****

But, ultimately, there wasn't much point in doing this, other than to give people jobs, and give some Hollywood-types more "green" cred. The production was carbon-neutral (wouldn't that have been ironic?), which means they presumably paid carbon credits used to destroy old-growth forests for eucalyptus plantations.

"The Universe wastes nothing," Keatu says at one point.

He's never been to Hollywood.

The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008) is a cable-watcher.

* I hope there's a "please" in there, somewhere!

** Kenny has a wonderful illustrated tribute to director Robert Mulligan, who died this week. It's far better than anything I could contribute.

*** My wife and I have a habit--a ritual, if you will--whenever we watch a movie with Keanu in it. After every line of his dialogue, one of us will murmur a disappointed "Don't speak," in response to his poor inflaction choices--or lack of them.

**** There is one amusing bit--when Benson is shanghaied to participate in the landing investigation by the military, it's set-up and photographed exactly as it was done in "The Andromeda Strain"...directed by original TDTESS director Robert Wise. Coincidence? Nothing's a coincidence in a "re-imagining."

***** I hate playing the "If only..." game—it smacks of frustrated screenwriters—but, as they had an Albert Einstein-clone in the original, it would have been interesting to have a Stephen Hawking in this one—brilliant, but crippled, talking through a voice-box. If Klaatu wanted inspiration from the human race, who better? Then, imagine this scenario: the group leaves, but Klaatu hangs back, turning to look at the wheelchair-bound pysicist. "I could cure you..." Pause The voice-box rasps: "Save...the...world."

But, they didn't.