A Face in the Crowd (1957) |
Plot Synopsis (continued)
Mel At the Bar with Marcia - Mel's Expose Book About Lonesome: Mel revealed that he hadn't retreated back to Memphis as planned, but remained in New York to write a book - an expose on the fraudulent character of Lonesome, entitled 'Demagogue in Denim.' His critical expose was designed to unmask the real scoundrel under the trappings of a good-ol' boy:
Marcia turned away and slightly defended Lonesome - claiming it was becoming challenging for him with so many "political big shots" angling to influence him, and changing him:
Mel realized, sadly, that Marcia still harbored love for Lonesome: "You're still with him." She admitted that she had no alternative but to remain allied with Lonesome - mostly for financial reasons:
When Mel snidely asked: "And how are the Mama Guitars selling?", Marcia (fiddling to light a second cigarette) regretfully confessed that she had created, as Dr. Frankenstein had, an out-of-control, monstrous 'celebrity' persona, and therefore felt responsible for sticking with him, and trying to "make him better." Mel harshly believed that she had allowed herself to be exploited:
Agent Joey's Affair With Betty Lou: When Lonesome arrived in his penthouse suite calling out to Betty Lou about the latest Gallup Poll results, he found Joey suspiciously emerging from the shadows in his bedroom. Reacting to Lonesome's look of utter rage, Joey urged him: "You're not going to hit me" - as Lonesome's song: "An Old Fashioned Marriage" played on the soundtrack. Although Lonesome was threatening to strike his slimy and sleazy agent, the caddish, sleazy Joey counter-threatened:
Lonesome went a step further and fired his cheating agent ("You're fired. You're through with Lonesome"), but Joey shot back with news that he owned 51% of the company and that they were locked together in a business arrangement:
After Joey left, Betty Lou tentatively peeked out of the bedroom entryway, wearing a low-cut formal gown with a fur piece around her neck and holding an ice cream soda glass in hand. Lonesome contacted Beanie by phone and ordered Betty Lou back to Arkansas on the train, effectively nullifying their relationship, and canceling her upcoming appearance on the popular TV variety program, The Ed Sullivan Show:
Betty Lou reacted by shrieking and running into her bedroom where she flopped herself onto the bed and tossed a large stuffed animal at the wall. Late Night Visit to Marcia - Lonesome's Disturbing Revelations: After the devastating discovery of Joey's affair with Betty Lou, Lonesome ran off - in the rain - to pay a late night visit to Marcia's apartment to regain a sense of decency and sanity. As Mel had predicted, she was functioning as Lonesome's 'locker room' ("You're the shock absorber for collisions with ex-wives and models and new wives and assorted tramps"). In the dark, Marcia was awakened by Lonesome's anxious pounding at her door ("It's me, big me, the king...Lonesome's back!"). She answered in a black nightgown, and as he entered, he hastily began undressing as he sat on her bed (and assumed they would be having sex), and hyperactively told her what had happened:
With the General's maneuvering, he had been orchestrating his meteoric political rise to a powerful position in government, by being appointed to a new Cabinet position, US Secretary for National Morale, if Senator Fuller was elected President. A kickoff to his newfound political clout would occur with his hosting of a large party-banquet in his penthouse the following evening for a group of politicos - he would promote an organization ("Fighters For Fuller") to support the Senator that would land him in the White House - in exchange for a promise of political ascendancy for himself in one of Fuller's new and powerful Cabinet positions. During the revealing and disturbing bedroom scene, he expressed confidence that he was the king-pin in the plan - it was a startling revelation that he had become insatiably power-hungry in his quest to help Senator Worthington Fuller with his presidential campaign. He delivered a disturbing, arrogant power-trip confession to Marcia that his audience would sheepishly follow him anywhere - directed to wherever he wished. He transparently revealed his toxic, self-loathing scorn for his own inferior, populist audience, as he had done years earlier as they left the town of Riddle for Memphis on the train. As he laid back on her bed, he continued about how he would be the power behind the president, and she would be the power behind him:
In that moment when he asserted "You made me," Marcia realized that she had built his rise to stardom, and likewise, she had to defeat, stop, or destroy his megalomaniacal assertions. Instead of getting in bed with him, she reached over, turned out the light, ran to her closet and hurriedly dressed, and proceeded out into the dark and rainy street. Lonesome's National TV Cracker Barrel Show the Next Day: The next day, as Lonesome poured himself another drink at his office desk (he rejected the offer of coffee from one of his secretaries), his TV producer predicted chaos for the upcoming show - he blamed the mess because Marcia didn't show up all day and couldn't be located. When the producer insisted: "She's the only one who can coordinate," Lonesome berated his staff with vitriolic language and name-calling:
He was self-assured that he could hold the show together by ad-libbing on his own before walking out: "Okay, I'll handle it....Ad-lib. Just keep up with me. I've saved the show before." As predicted, there was chaos in the control room during the show. As the show was about to wrap, Marcia (who murmured "I don't care") stumbled through the control room, and smoked a cigarette in the sound booth. She heard Lonesome asking on-camera:
When he then asked, off-camera and off-the-air, for the control room to run a home movie about his weekend trip duck-shooting with 'Curly' (Senator Fuller's new nickname) and there was a delay, he was furious: "Hey, you lunkheads up there in the projection room, show us the movie!" He spotted Marcia in the sound booth and viciously screamed at her through the thick window: "I wanna talk to you. I can't tonight because I gotta rush over to the banquet. But first thing in the morning. In my office, in the morning." Lonesome continued to criticize his hard-working staff: "I'm surrounded by a lot of dim-witted sons of...," but then when he returned to the stage and was on-camera, he suddenly reverted to his charming persona for the audience, spouting an aphorism: "The family that prays together stays together.". After the national TV show concluded and went off the air for a few moments, Lonesome believed that his microphone had been cut off. He was relieved that the show was over, but was boiling mad: ("I'm glad that's over. I'm gonna start shootin' people instead of ducks"). During the closing advertisements and crawling credits, Lonesome sarcastically mocked 'Curly' as not really a "great hunter." The soundman next to Marcia fantasized: "Oh, if they ever heard the way that psycho really talks" - inspiring her to expose him. The Exposure of the Fraudulent Lonesome Rhodes: In the sound booth, Marcia deliberately turned up the sound switches to turn on Rhodes' studio microphone so that his adoring audience could hear their idolized, genial country boy personally and nastily insulting them. One of the good ol' boy characters on stage remarked to Lonesome how Senator Fuller was a fake: "Can you really sell that stiff as a 'man among men'?" In the shocking sequence, the fraudulent megalomaniac and demagogue celebrity expressed his utter contempt for his mass audience - deriding them, and mocking them as stupid morons and fools who were watching him at home. There were inserts of the General and Senator Fuller (dressing for the banquet) aghast as they listened to his cynicism:
Despondent over destroying him, Marcia sobbed in the booth, as betrayed, furious fans in different settings wondered to themselves what they had just heard, and decided to turn on him by phoning the FBN (Federal Broadcasting Network):
The Rapid Demise and Downfall of Lonesome Rhodes: On the top floor of the studio (above the 42nd floor), the elevator operator symbolically foretold Lonesome's ultimate career demise as he entered the lift - taking Lonesome down (with Beanie) to the lobby as he was rushing home to his penthouse for the scheduled banquet:
Angry callers besieged the phone lines into FBN with intense criticisms as the elevator floor light buttons illuminated at various floors during its descent:
When the elevator plummeted down to the lobby level (with Lonesome's own fortunes precipitously declining), he continued his derogatory statements, not realizing that his audience and advertisers were deserting him in droves:
The FBN President conversed by phone with Rhodes' agent DePalma, citing their contractual 'morals clause' as enough justification for cancelling Lonesome's show ("That's right, DePalma, you know your contract, the morals clause. Any act abusing public confidence"). DePalma was undeterred and already had someone waiting in the wings to replace him: "I think I've got just the boy to fill the gap. Yeah, Barry Mills. Mm-hmm. Yeah. He's a young Lonesome Rhodes and a lot easier to handle." Sitting next to DePalma in a restaurant, Southern-accented Barry Mills (Rip Torn) modestly claimed: "Buddy, I'm just a country boy." In his limousine, Lonesome poured himself a drink as he urged his driver to speed to his penthouse, since he had only 30 minutes until the banquet commenced. In the Variety magazine printing room, the headlines were prepared for the next issue, Wednesday, November 21, 1956, and read outloud by one of the printers (Willie Feibel):
A second printer (Larry Casazza) reacted: "I never seen what people saw in that guy, but whatever it was, he's had it." Lonesome's Abandoned Penthouse Banquet: Mel entered the deserted FBN studio, inquiring pessimistically: "Like the sinking of the Titanic. A night to remember. What happened?" He was directed to a saddened Marcia still in the darkened sound booth. There, he complimented her for exposing Lonesome's duplicity: "I hear you just wrote the ending to my book." An urgent phone call from rabble-rousing Lonesome to Marcia came from his empty penthouse, and he was begging for her support. She listened without responding but ducked her head, as he moaned that all of his esteemed guests for a fancy dinner party of political elites had canceled and he was left suffering a spectacular downfall and melt-down. He was seated at the head of a long banquet table next to two huge portraits of a smiling Fuller flanking him on either side. He was obviously drunk, incensed and delusional - and alone, attended only by black butlers and servants (whom he desperately begged to love him) and a tuxedoed Beanie:
He personally confronted and grabbed Francis (the one elderly servant who had gestured that Lonesome was going 'loco mad' by drawing a circle at his temple with a white-gloved hand), and shook him by his shoulders as he embraced him. As he raged on, he narcissistically pleaded for his love, and then threw all of the servants out with a racial slur: "Get out, you dressed-up black monkeys. You turn my stomach. Get out!" He returned to the phone to again implore Marcia to come to him: "Marcia. Marcia, how soon can you get here? I'm surrounded by traitors." At first, he wasn't aware that she was the one who kept his microphone on, and instead blamed the live microphone fiasco on his sound engineer: "That engineer, wait till I get him. I'll fire him. I'll burn him over a slow fire." Become more desperate and raving mad, he threatened to suicidally jump from his penthouse and end his life, and Marcia responded by encouraging him with a scream of desperate hurt at being betrayed and duped:
After Mel hung up the phone, he didn't believe that Marcia meant what she said, and asked why she didn't admit on the phone that she was the one who had turned on his microphone. She struggled to explain her reluctance to come clean, explaining that she needed to disown him "face-to-face." As the phone rang back, without being answered, Mel insisted that she inform Lonesome how she really felt about him ("chop it off clean"), in order to get rid of him for good:
The Final Confrontation with Marcia at Lonesome's Penthouse: In the film's devastating conclusion, Mel convinced Marcia to pay one last visit to Lonesome's penthouse, decorated with a "FIGHTERS FOR FULLER" banner. When Mel escorted her there, they saw his dark shadow reflected onto the banquet table as he stood on the bedroom's balcony above, gesturing and preaching to an unseen and fantasized crowd below. He was bolstered by his 'applause machine' (with the loud sound of pre-recorded fake accolades) manned by Beanie. He had been ranting and raving like a mad-man, according to the elevator operator:
Aghast with her hands to her face, Marcia looked up in horror and emotional pain at Lonesome one story above her, as he continued his delusionary rant about himself:
Mel glanced at the banquet banner: "THERE'S NOTHING AS TRUSTWORTHY – AS THE ORDINARY MIND OF THE ORDINARY MAN" - Lonesome Rhodes. He also heard the grief-stricken, displaced Lonesome singing the lyrics to a blues song: "Ten thousand miles away from home, And I don't even know my name." When Rhodes spotted Marcia below him, he gleefully rushed down his balcony stairs to her, and grabbed her, hoping for her acceptance and vowing that he could convince his public to support him again:
And then, Marcia offered him a devastating denouncement - she was the one who had betrayed him: "Larry, it was me." But he wasn't listening as he chastised his own sound engineer: "Then I'm back on top again. First thing I do when I'm back on top, I'll get that sound man. I'll get that dirty, stinkin' little mechanical genius." A second time, Marcia calmly admitted: "It was me. I held the key open. On purpose. I'm tellin' you this so you'll never call me again. Never again." He accepted her confession, called her his pet name: "My marshmallow," and wished her luck: "Good luck with Mel." Before leaving, Marcia apologized: "Larry, I'm sorry. Forgive me." Defeated, he sent her away, and she ran toward the elevator with Mel supporting her by the shoulders, as Lonesome pointed at them with a warning: "Listen, I'm not through yet. You know what's gonna happen to me?" Mel turned back, and in a long and slow tracking shot toward Lonesome as he approached, he predicted the fading star's future - he would have a comeback, of sorts, after a period of forgetting about him, but would never reacquire his past popularity and prestige, and would eventually be surpassed by a new face - such as Barry Mills:
In response, Lonesome yelled to a dozing Beanie - to get him to crank up the volume on the applause machine. Mel entered the elevator with Marcia to descend to the street level where they hailed a taxi. Lonesome turned toward the lower balcony and screamed out for Marcia - catching her attention far below as she was about to board the taxi:
Mel and Marcia both swiveled and looked upward to the penthouse apartment where they could hear Rhodes as he pitifully called out to her. To strengthen Marcia's resolve, Mel commented that they both could now admit that they had been duped and taken in by Lonesome, but had become stronger and wiser as a result:
After ignoring the shouted pleas, their cab drove away and passed under a large, flashing Coca-Cola sign, while the sounds of New York City traffic began to drown out Lonesome's cries. |