Thanks to Reason Magazine for a brief article describing
this film, and another, “Meet John Doe”, both of which I had been unaware of
previously.
This was a 1957 film which brought Andy Griffith to
stardom and led to him getting his famous TV show. More recently he was known for “Matlock”. He died fairly recently, in 2012. He was born in North Carolina, died there, and
went to UNC-Chapel Hill.
Anyhow. A radio
exec, Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal, who I recall from “The Fountainhead” as
Dominique Francon, alongside Gary Cooper as Howard Roark) discovers “Lonesome” Rhodes
(Griffith) in the drunk tank of the local jail in northeast Arkansas. She quickly realizes that he’s a flamboyant,
charismatic personality and catapults him to local stardom. Soon he’s in Memphis and impresses Mel Miller
(a younger – but still looking old – Walter Matthau) who he thereafter refers
to as “Vanderbilt ‘44” when Miller reveals his academic credentials.
Eventually Rhodes winds up in New York and befriends some
powerful people, including Senator “Curly” Fuller, who is running for President
but isn’t particularly popular. Rhodes
cultivates a Will Rogers persona of an honest, simple country boy from Arkansas
but shows considerable guile and duplicity behind the scenes and no compunction
about hawking patent medicines of dubious value – the company’s own medical
expert considers the product to be worthless and the best that can be said
about it is that “it won’t kill you.”
Marcia falls in love with him, and he proposes to her,
then his wife (???) shows up and warns her about his wandering penis. When confronted he claims he received a
Mexican divorce but will return to Mexico to straighten it out. Sure enough he does – and brings back a new,
17 year old bride (Lee Remick). D’oh!
The final straw for Marcia comes when Rhodes succeeds at
improving Fuller’s poll numbers and brags that his contribution should be
rewarded with a cabinet level position.
Defrauding America with sugar pills is one thing, but this clown will
now be in the President’s cabinet? Give
me a break. Marcia sabotages him by putting
him ON THE AIR when he thinks he’s off the air - then he boasts that his fans
are idiots and he could sell them rotten meat without an issue. When his audience hears this the phones ring
off the hook and his career takes an immediate nosedive – during the time he’s
in the elevator from the top floor down to the lobby. Even his own staff – a team of black servants
– can’t help laughing at him. We don’t
see whether he kills himself – Marcia herself tells him “JUMP!” – but in any
case you can stick a fork in him, he’s DONE.
It’s tempting to compare him to Trump, which was Reason’s
point in bringing up the movie at this particular time. Hillary’s campaign has succeeded at revealing
some fairly unsavory remarks DT made in private, in particular his bragging about
grabbing women intimately. So far he
hasn’t come out and expressed his own contempt for his followers, and so far
they seem to write off whatever he says, no matter how outrageous and
politically incorrect, as “locker room talk”, as if all men brag in the locker
room that they simply walk up to women and grab their vaginas. It’s moot: even if he confessed to murder or
child molesting, his backers would whine “BENGHAZI! EMAILS!” and still support him.
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