I just finished watching this movie and it is one of the best movies I have ever seen.
How Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, Walter Mattheau AND director Elia Kazan AND screenwriter Bud Schulberg were not even nominated for Academy Awards is beyond me.
I will never look at Sherriff Andy Taylor in the same way again.
If you rent the dvd, be sure to watch the special features part where Andy talks about how Kazan told him before filming the scene where the very young Lee Remick (playing the 17 year old baton twirller) who is flirting with Andy and Andy has to respond to her with a lecherous look, to “fuck her”.
I never thought I would hear Andy Taylor errr Griffith say “fuck”, but in the movie that is exactly what he does with that expression in that particular scene.
Brilliant film, I am ashamed I had never seen it before now.
I agree – it’s an amazing movie. Apologies for being shallow, but I was surprised at how sexy Andy Griffith can be – he’s just oozing. I have the DVD but haven’t watched the special features.
Loved the movie when I last saw it, some many years back–but to this day, I’m disgusted by the fact that that ending would no longer play in real life.
I think the ending would remain perfect. Lonesome Rhodes wasn’t finished forever at the end- he was bound to make a comeback of some kind, eventually, but he’d never, ever be as big as he was, and would end up a mostly forgotten show biz footnote.
Which is exactly what would happen to a similar celeb caught saying similar things today.
This was my impetus for digging out the DVD today, to hear Andy say “fuck”.
The DVD came in a set – Warner Brothers “controversial classics” – I’d recommend it. It also includes *I Am A Fugitive from a Chain Gang, The Americanization of Emily, Fury, Bad Day at Black Rock, Advise and Consent, * and Blackboard Jungle. I’d seen all those movies but watching them with commentary, and with the special features, makes me appreciate them more.
Today, it would not be believable that the type of comment made by Rhodes would be enough to bring him down (his folksy persona wouldn’t work today either). On the whole, the public is more cynical and tolerant of “bad boy” behavior from media figures today than it was during the 50s. In fact, if anything, a savvy manipulator like Rhodes would capitalize on his gaffe since people would be tuning in to find out what kind of outrageous thing he’d say next.
About the only thing that could suddenly destroy a figure like Rhodes would be if he was caught on tape molesting an 8-year old while spouting racial slurs. Aside from that, people would just gradually get bored with him and move on to someone else.
More fundamentally, even in the Fifties, it was silly to imagine that a TV personality, ANY television personality, could wield the kind of power Lonesome Rhodes was supposed to wield. It’s absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to imagine today, when there are 200 TV channels and even the #1 show in the Nielsen rating can’t draw more than about 10% of the population. But even in the Fifties, people were taking television too seriously and scaring themselves with the silly idea that a wily, devious entertainer could make himself Der Fuhrer.
In the entire history of television, by my reckoning, only three people came close to having America’s undivided attention: Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson and Walter Cronkite. Of those three, two were apolitical land one was a liberal. And if Ed Sullivan had TIED to tell Americans who to vote for, people wouldn’t have obeyed- rather, the people who disagreed would have gotten angry and tuned out.
Today, there is no longer any TV entertainer with more than a sizable minority of America’s population tuning in each week- and NO entertainer has ever been in a position to snap his fingers and tell America how to vote.
If a McCarthyite director had made a movie about a New York-born Jewish comedian using his TV show to promote communism, most people would scoff at the notion, and they’d be right. It’s a STUPID concept. But because Lonesome Rhodes was a Southern country boy, the notion was taken more seriously than it deserved to be (cause, after all, those Southern rednecks are really gullible and sheeplike, and they’d turn fascist in a second if “Hee Haw” or “Petticoat Junction” told them to!).
