A Face in The Crowd (film) - Real-life Inspirations

Real-life Inspirations

Aspects of the Lonesome Rhodes character were likely inspired by 1940s and '50s CBS radio-TV star Arthur Godfrey. The scene where Rhodes, on TV in Memphis, spoofs his sponsor echoes Godfrey's reputation for kidding his own advertisers. Godfrey claimed he would not advertise products he did not believe in, and routinely ridiculed both the sponsors' stodgy ad copy and occasionally, the companies' executives. The more Godfrey did this, the more sales increased. Godfrey's immense popularity began to deflate following his 1953 on-air firing of singer Julius LaRosa, which opened the gradual exposure of his less lovable, often controlling off-camera personality. Though he remained on radio, TV and even films for several years afterward, Godfrey's mass appeal and popularity had passed its apex, and were never the same. At one point in the film, Rhodes telegraphs Jeffries that he's going to miss a broadcast and requests that Godfrey fill in for him.

Some have suggested that the character may have been inspired in part by John Henry Faulk, a country comedian who was long blacklisted as a result of the "Red Scare," although Faulk was never really a national figure.

Screenwriter Schulberg himself claimed to have based a significant part of the character's facade on that of Will Rogers, adding a distinctively un-Rogers-like level of amorality and cruelty. In Richard Schickel's 2005 biography of director Elia Kazan, Schulberg explained that he had met Will Rogers, Jr. during the latter's run for Congress and discussed his famous father. The younger Rogers supposedly told Schulberg that his father socialized with the very establishment types he mocked in his public pronouncements, adding that his father was actually a political reactionary in private life.

The film's scene with Marcia turning up the volume on the studio, with Rhodes unaware that his voice can now be heard by his viewers, was inspired by the debunked urban legend of radio's "Uncle Don" show where he thought that he was off the air. His words: "This is Uncle Don, saying good night. We're off. Good, that will hold those little bastards."

The film marked the debut of actress Lee Remick, who plays a teenage baton-twirling champion from Arkansas, one of Rhodes's love interests whom he marries instead of Marcia Jeffries. To underscore the sway of television media in America, Kazan cleverly incorporated several cameos by popular "talking heads", including: Sam Levenson, John Cameron Swayze, Mike Wallace, Earl Wilson, and Walter Winchell.

Two cast members had genuine ties to the country music field. Rod Brasfield was a popular Grand Ole Opry comedian in the 1950s, known for his own performances and onstage comic banter with legendary Opry comic Minnie Pearl. Big Jeff Bess, who portrayed the Sheriff, was a Nashville-based country music performer on radio station WLAC there, leading a group called "Big Jeff and His Radio Playboys," which recorded for Dot Records and included guitarist Grady Martin. Bess was, for a time, the husband of Tootsie Bess, longtime owner of Nashville's famous downtown bar Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, a hangout for country entertainers.