A Face in the Crowd/Trivia


 * Mean Character, Nice Actor: "Lonesome" Rhodes is a manipulative, power-hungry television star. Andy Griffith was... well, Andy Griffith - not perfect, but definitely one of the good guys.
 * Playing Against Type: Andy Griffith, best known as either kindly small-town sheriff Andy Taylor or no-nonsense defense attorney Ben Matlock, got his first big acting break as Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes, a superficially charming con man drunk with power in Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd. Griffith became so engrossed in the role that he started incorporating his character's mannerisms into his everyday life, and became so disgusted with himself that he refused to play villains ever again. (And he kept to that until the late 1980s, playing a heartless judge who sentences an adolescent girl to hard time in federal prison in a TV movie made at the height of his Matlock fame.)
 * Retroactive Recognition: For Andy Griffith (Playing Against Type) and Lee Remick.


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