Andy Griffith’s movie career ended before it had really started — and helped lead him to TV stardom on The Andy Griffith Show.
In 1957, Griffith, who died in 2012 at the age of 86, starred in his feature film debut, A Face in the Crowd, directed by Elia Kazan. Griffith played Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, a drifter who is discovered by a radio producer (played by Patricia Neal). Soon, Rhodes uses television to rise to nationwide fame. But he becomes an egomaniac, mocking the very people who made him famous.
Biographer Daniel de Vise, author of Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show, told Woman’s World in an interview published April 21 that Griffith thought this movie would be his breakthrough.
“Getting this Kazan film, of course, was a huge deal,” he told the outlet. “Kazan was at the top of his game, having directed A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront and Giant, among others, so anybody who was a leading man for Kazan was a big deal. And so A Face in the Crowd was a major, major coup for Andy.”
He noted that A Face in the Crowd was “probably his single greatest role as far as a one-off thing” and that “nothing” approaches the work he did in the film, as a dark and twisted person.
De Vise also noted, however, that the role came at a high cost. “I know from what I read about him and what people told me, that it really chewed him up and spat him out during that role because he sort of method-acted it,” he said. “And so he kind of became the Lonesome Rhodes character during that time.”
He explained, “I can’t overstate that he became more like the Lonesome Rhodes character while he was playing him, and probably had to chill out and decompress after that role, and then became more normal again afterwards.”
A Face in the Crowd did not succeed when it was released, however.
“At the time, A Face in the Crowd got middling reviews. A lot of people didn’t get it, so it probably wasn’t considered a huge hit at the time, either critically or commercially,” De Vise said. “And it was one of a string of tragedies in Andy’s life that he wasn’t able to convert the success of that movie into more great film roles, because his next film, Onionhead, was a flop.”
By 1960, he had given up on movies and turned his focus to television. De Vise said, “From Andy Griffith’s own perspective, it was his only play, because after A Face in the Crowd, he struck out in cinema.”
When The Andy Griffith Show premiered in October 1960, it became a major success and Griffith became known in the hearts and minds of Americans as good-hearted Sheriff Andy Taylor. The show also starred Ron Howard as Opie, Don Knotts as Barney Fife and Frances Bavier as Aunt Bee.
But De Vise thinks that to say Griffith was more like Andy Taylor than Lonesome Rhodes would be a mistake.
“I think the real guy has probably got elements of that Lonesome Rhodes character, and there are wonderful elements of him that are elements of the Andy Taylor sheriff character,” he said. “I don’t think either Lonesome Rhodes or Andy Taylor is all Andy. I think there’s bits of both those characters in the real guy.”
The Andy Griffith Show aired from 1960 to 1968. He struggled to find a hit series afterwards, until he landed the titular role in Matlock, which aired from 1985 to 1995. He only appeared in a handful of movies, including 1975’s Hearts of the West, 1985’s Rustlers’ Rhapsody and 2007’s Waitress. A Face in the Crowd is also now considered a classic; in 2008, it was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry.