Before Andy Griffith became the just and quietly confident Andy Taylor, sheriff in the fictious town of Mayberry, he had a major role in Elia Kazan’s 1957 film A Face in the Crowd. The film is a brutal satire of American entertainment and politics, and of the strange and unlikely ways they are intertwined.
Griffith plays a drifter, Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, passing through Pickett, a fictional small town in Arkansas. As the film opens, Rhodes is in jail, arrested for being drunk and disorderly. He doesn’t have much to his name, and even that may be fake. In his suitcase is a bottle of booze and a few shirts. His most prized possession is his “Mama Guitar.”
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