While Andy Griffith is remembered now as one of the original sitcom superstars, he once had a career as a popular movie actor. He turns in an astonishing performance as Lonesome Rhodes in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd, quickly followed by his hilarious team-up with Don Knotts in No Time for Sergeants. That comedy smash was the fourth highest-grossing film of 1958. Griffith appeared to be heading to movie stardom, but that train was quickly derailed.
The problem? Studio greed. After the success of No Time for Sergeants, Warner Bros. wanted to keep raking in that sweet Andy Griffith cash. It rushed another military comedy, Onionhead, into theaters, just five months after Sergeants. One of the film’s posters announced, “That wonderful No Time for Sergeants meathead ANDY GRIFFITH is back as Onionhead!”
He’s “goofin’-up the Coast Guard now!” trumpeted another.
Unfortunately for the studio and the actor, Onionhead was “terrible bad,” according to Griffith himself, per the biography Andy and Don.
“At the preview of this picture, Onionhead, there were two girls in front of me,” Griffith told The Birmingham News, per MeTV. “One left for 15 minutes. When she came back, she said to the other, ‘Sorry to have been gone so long.’
Reviewers were just as cruel. “This latest Andy Griffith outing is a particular disappointment, but no matter when it had come, it would have been just as disappointing,” wrote John Bustin in the Austin American-Statesman. “For as comedy, Onionhead is generally about as funny as a crutch and certainly no more inspired.”
Onionhead quickly reversed Griffith’s fortunes. The actor remembered sitting with his William Morris agents after a long lull with no work. “I asked ‘em if there was any pictures comin’ up that I might do, and they hawed about it a bit and said, ‘Well, no, there wasn’t.’ So I right out asked one of ‘em, ‘Has anybody asked for me?’ And I guess this sort of caught him off-guard because he said, quicker’n he’d meant to, ‘No.’”
Movies and Broadway dried up for Griffith, which left the medium of last resort: Television. “I’d always been afraid of it,” he said, “because I figured if you strike out there, that’s it.”
But with no other prospects, Griffith’s manager approached TV producer Sheldon Leonard, who knew Griffith from his funny records. Leonard bit right away because he understood that Griffith came with a built-in comedy persona. “Thinking of something for a personality is the easiest part,” he said. “Andy Griffith, country boy. What’s the show going to be? He’s going to be a country boy.”
To save money on a pilot, Leonard launched Griffith as a small-town sheriff on two episodes of his hit sitcom, The Danny Thomas Show. The character clicked immediately, so much so that General Foods signed on to sponsor The Andy Griffith Show and its Americana comedy before the episodes even aired.
And none of that sitcom magic ever happens without the failure of Onionhead.
