A Face in the Crowd Trailer from BiteSize TV on Vimeo.

An old movie that is again relevant. Funny how that works. It’s historically significant on multiple levels. It’s the movie that made Andy Griffith a star. He plays a character as dark and complex as the preacher Robert Mitchum played in Night of the Hunter. For all of Griffith’s later success, he would never again show off such prodigious acting skills.

Of course, he had the benefit of the direction of Elia Kazan, three years after the masterpiece that was On the Waterfront, and more years into the descending cloud of lefty opprobrium for his testimony against communists in the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. More about Kazan’s possible motives later.

At the time, though, it was considered something of a variation on Citizen Kane, a fictional take on the career of the biggest media superstar of the day, a radio and television host named Arthur Godfrey, who was at one point regarded as the most famous man in America. It was thus, apart from its other interpretations, one of the very first explorations of the impacts and perils of mass media celebrity as a force unhooked from actual achievement.

Like the protagonist of A Face in the Crowd, Godfrey was ultimately laid low by exposure of the contrast between his aw shucks demeanor and his real personality.

I watched it again last night after a long long time of not needing to see it again. It proved something of a revelation in terms of our current cultural and political climate.

The Griffith character is discovered by an ambitious radio host (Patricia Neal, the only woman who could ever have played Dagny Taggart) in the drunk tank of a rural Arkansas jail. He can sing and play the guitar, but his talent at that can’t hold a candle to his instinct for spotting an opportunity to make a score. He’s pure psychopath, incredibly quick to read everyone else’s motivations and vulnerabilities. He’s also a born down-home charmer. The Pat Neal character dubs him “Lonesome Rhodes” and plucks him from nothing to celebrity.

The movie charts his rise from guest talent on an Arkansas radio show to national radio and TV megastar. As I watched I began to understand the dumb-smart traps that killed Elia Kazan’s life and career. Which are some of the same dumb-smart traps that make contemporary progressives so ridiculous and dangerous.

I don’t want to ascribe TOO much vision to Kazan, but I do think he’s grappling with conflicting intentions in this production. He wants both to explain why he was tempted by communism in the first place and why there are times when you break accepted moral codes to bring down a clear and present danger. And I think he wanted to be forgiven; why he made the threat of Lonesome Rhodes into a right wing populist in thrall to evil Republican politicians and crony capitalists.

Given Kazan’s own history, the plot is all over the place. Yet he manages to fight through his own complicated situation to arrive at some brand new insights about the impact of pervasive media. He seems prescient in demonstrating the now accepted truism that all publicity is good publicity. Lonesome openly mocks the product of his show’s main sponsor, which increases sales. He soon becomes a political consultant for a senator who desires to be president. “They don’t need to respect you,” he lectures. “They need to loooove you.”

Patricia Neal and her intellectual admirer Walter Matthau are stand-ins for Kazan himself. Neal the one in love with the romantic illusion of a beast she cannot bring herself to see whole. Matthau the timid intellect that suppresses its doubts and conspires in the fraud until he can no longer stomach the monstrosity of its nature.

There is this kind of duality, even splitting of viewpoints, throughout. Lonesome Rhodes knows he’s a bad man. He just can’t help taking advantage when the evil and weaknesses of others open doors to him. He responds to the virtue of Neal. He despises the gutlessness of Matthau. He is begging to be stopped. But he can also envision the possibility of becoming president himself one day. Which would mean all the drink and pussy any man could ever hope for.

But there is also a bottom line I’m pretty sure Elia Kazan never gave much thought to. The bedrock cultural assumption of the movie is that the vast numbers of people Lonesome Rhodes appealed to were stupid, ignorant, gullible dross. In the end it was the danger of firing them up — against plainly fine policies like Social Security — that required the smart if diffident heroes to bring him down by fair means or foul.

I’m sure Elia Kazan thought this was a no brainer. It’s why he became a member of the American Communist Party in the first place. The idea was never to put the proletariat in charge. It was to protect the proletariat from their own misguided beliefs.

So, as I watched the portrayal of a flyover country populist as a stone psychopath, I thought of phrases like “bitter clingers” and “tea bagger racists.” I understood why they hate Rush Limbaugh so much and with so much self-congratulating superiority even though they have never listened to his show. He’s just Lonesome Rhodes all over again. The smart progressives among us love the people, all right; they just can’t stand to be close enough to smell them.

1957. That’s how long the smart, highly educated, beneficent ones have been condescending to the rest of us. They learned the media trick early. Why they have lost all their reluctance to lie about everything all the time. It’s for our own good.

Do you start to see?