THE MOUNTEBANK AT THE MOVIES

...The outcome again is comforting, as monster mountebank's weakness is symbolized in his loss of hegemony over his young sister...

...The mountebank, whose face emerges from the crowd to become its face for a while, is here a guitar-playing, country music-singing hillbilly hobo, Andy Griffith, magnified by television into a monster of seductive megalomania—combining resemblances to a wide choice of idols —reaching from influence upon the purchase of mattresses and vitamin pills towards political power...

...Beneath the emery-paper veneer, however, is a familiar show business melodrama of backstage intrigue, treachery, and eventual triumph for embattled righteousness...

...The commerciality of commercial radio is significantly avoided...

...Again, however, the film, in necessarily offering another entertainment to be enjoyed, makes too little more than entertainment of the matter of the idolization of entertainers...

...and periodicals of topical Hftxfism, devoted to the perpetual Jpfcfctrination of successive genera-jpas of readers in the conjugation of Xtertainment and events, until the §fly events are entertainment, and entertainers and entertained are distinguishable only in the aspect of the angle of reportage...

...But television virtue triumphs in the end, as the producer is shown to be terribly unhappy, for all his power and glory, and the honest writer announces that he is going to stick it out in Hollywood, fighting the good fight for the true and the beautiful, come what guerdons may...

...The public hearing or watching the story, then, is really left with no sense of there being anything it can do with its own evil creatures—except, of course, to wait for the comfortingly inevitable outcome, as in the story...

...In films about singers, or musicians, or comedians, or athletes, or others who perform while people watch and listen, the action involving the performance itself typically instructs the audience in the theater by carefully moving from the figure of the performer to the faces of the fictive spectators—again and again, until it is quite clear that we, on both sides of the screen, are expected to be enraptured by the greatest little lady who ever socked over a song, or the greatest dancer, or the greatest this or that...

...The screen play by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman is the most fluently bitter of all the contemporary antidotes against the poisons of popularity—albeit more narrowly specific, and therapeutically limited, to begin with...

...The public itself, apparently, cannot otherwise be personified— although it is equally apparent chat the writer's very role inevitably places him outside the public, even at the moment when he is speaking for it...

...or the sacramental rites of popularity polls and audience rating systems, in which the public looks on happily as its own entraili are minutely examined for auguries...

...The Mountebank At The Movies by MARTIN S. DWORKIN ONE OF these days, that grinning, orating, canting, crooning, back-slapping, guitar-strumming, platitude-burbling, complacency-stroking, power-pilfering phony on the platform, in the pulpit, in the newspaper columns, in the movies, on the radio, on television, on every rostrum for public attraction, diversion, persuasion, seduction, and just plain confectionery swindling, is going to take his fated pratfall and get what he deserves...

...The game of debunking the popularly great sang go no further than a kind of childen cruelty: a little turnabout mockerfs for a moment when the crowd ie« freshes its docility in a communal...

...But the audience is shown its own face only occasionally, and then rarely with such fidelity that there is recognition...

...The melodrama of the finale, however, with all its irony, suggests the weakness not of the mountebank, but of his creators and creatures...

...Even as they lavish credulity and adulation, they search out imperfections and scandal, relishing the exhibition of equated qualities and frailties until there has been just enough noise and smoke and empathy to induce the salutary yawn of democracy...

...There are, for example, the signs in radio and television studios calling up laughter, applause, and other rehearsed responses...

...The public in the story is saved in the nick of time, not by anything it can do itself, but by some turn of melodrama that is really beyond the powers of the public to accomplish...

...The Hollywood Award Winner, for example, strategically telecast a few days before the Academy Award presentations early this year, was quite clear about the artistic honesty of television, and the shoddy commercialism of the movies...

...the word "sponsor" being heard only in a wisecrack or two...

...W.," and the film's sense of the world in which Winchell has been absolute monarch for so long...

...Again, however, the sentimental miracle happens just in time, as the girl who discovered him and managed his rise, Patricia Neal, finally thinks with her brains instead of her glands, and works an improbable exposure over a nationwide network...

...This film again exemplifies the developing genre of what may be called the cinema a clef, in which the likenesses of the characters to actual persons adds caustic purposes to the fictions...

...The rise and fall of the false mes-siah, the demagogue, the mountebank with his fingers in the till of popular favor, is a perennial subject for parable—the more apposite, perhaps, in our time of electronic magnifications of sounds and images, yet still quite familiar, and comforting...

...The device is another form of the cheer-leading that pervades the popular media, whereby the audience is ingested by its own creatures...

...It is probably significant that the films The Great Man, A Face in the Crowd, and The Sweet Smell of Success follow upon one another so dosely...

...Written by Dick Berg for Kaiser Aluminum, the play depicted the disillusionment of a young, idealistic television writer who has been called to Hollywood to translate one of his crusading plays into a movie script...

...mi B59B9 In The Great Man, it is a radio reporter, played by Jose Ferrer (who also directed and helped write the screenplay with Al Morgan, from the latter's novel) who eventually speaks for the public, exposing—posthumously, but still in the nick of time —'the fraudulence of a leading radio and television "personality...

...It is not even inconsistent that the mountebank's own media are used to expose and ridicule him...

...But nearer origins unquestionably are in the class-conscious, social-reformative literature of the Depression...

...The best living, breathing caricature of this kind, of course, is the fabled "W...

...There may be no question that the sort of thing they try to do, whether it works completely or not, shows audiences some sharp pictures of despicable successes of the insolently sovereign underworlds of radio, television, scandal-scented journalism, and privately-serving public relations...

...There may be some validity in the view that the movie people ire having some innings at the expense of rival, frequently hostile media—especially radio and television...

...The audience appears only by inference, as the source and expression of his power—and never with that vital clarity that will reveal the whole, true face of the mountebank, on both sides of the screen...

...J.," the great newspaper gossip columnist and television panjandrum, monger-ing scandal, obsessive patriotism, and counterfeit sentimentality as the merchandise of what is essentially a vast business of public blackmail, is a figure of such coruscating malevolence as to resemble only a caricatured archetype...

...It is interesting how many of the moralities dealing basically with the public's images of its heroes and of itself have as their narrators or protagonists the familiar figure of the importer-writer, who, representing the public's conscience, sees all and #entually tells it...

...The same face, whose features the mass media mountebank wears as a mask, is almost recognizable in A Face in the Crowd, directed by Elia Kazan from Budd Schulberg's screen play...

...or the pages and pages of so-called...

...A principal reason for the ultimate indeterminacy of even the most effective parables of this kind is that the public being taken in, victimized —and eventually vindicated, of course, in the mountebank's downfall—is rarely shown clearly to be the same public watching or listening to the story...

...Kazan and Schulberg—who worked together on On the Waterfront—-are drawing a cartoon, with brushes and inks out of the documentary and neo-realistic cinema, and the cartoon is bold and exciting, if too hurriedly outlined...

...The character of ||e witer, personifying the search wtt and publication of the truth— although temporarily wallowing in the rewarding filth of crime, political corruption, crooked sporting events, and commercial malefactions—is commonplace in the movies...

...The Athenians depended upon occasional ostracism, and the republican Romans upon assassination, to protect themselves from the ominous ingratiation of their idols...

...If the movies do picture radio and television as supermarkets for packaged sham and sugared dema-goguery, television has been relishing a long series of dramas presenting the motion picture industry as a gilded cesspool, in which creative integrity sinks until it is merely undistinguish-able from the residual slime of success...

...The seriousness of films such as The Great Man, A Face in the Crowd, and The Sweet Smell of Success is made ultimately playful by their melodramatically satisfying conclusions...

...But there ought to be no simple faith in lasting cures—especially when the antidotes are taken largely for the same purposes, and work mainly as they attract, divert, and generally enthrall the mind...

...The writer as public conscience may himself become a monster, too —which may be seen as a "switch" on the mass media mountebank theme that is worked in The Sweet Smell of Success...

...The film has sharp, cocktail-classy dialogue, the suggestion, with relish, of the skulduggery and lechery within the soundproofed walls of network broadcasting—and the clear distortions of faint resemblances to real people, notably the late Arthur Godfrey, who is still alive...

...In parables of good and evil in the mass media, the observer-writer is almost a necessity...

...So runs the persistent hope or dream—or even, occasionally, the happy reality threading through the folklore of entertainment: the strain of self-criticism that is another face of the self-protective fickleness by which people eventually save themselves, once in a while, from their intoxication with their self-created popularity...

...Like the fairy tale "mirror, mirror, on the wall," the entertainment film characteristically reflects the viewers' projection of "the fairest of them all"—often for the deliberate purpose of explaining the precise experience they are supposed to be having...

...snicker—unless the people come to know that they have been playing at something that isn't a game...

...The problem has to do with how well the public recognizes itself in films about the public...

...Here, "J...

...And again, it is the ubiquitous writer, Walter Matthau, who gets out of television's gaudy grubstreet just in time to lecture the public on what the public is seeing—without making plain, however, that the public must see itself first and clearest of all...

...There are at least two sides to the game of disparagement, in any case...

...The publics of "the new era of the common man" must rely upon the at once coarser device of simply ceasing to applaud—and then denying attention to anyone who isn't being applauded...

...Moreover, in the manner of the familiar folk fantasies of the overthrow of witches, evil kings, and mortgage-wielding villains, it is only through the working of sentimentally punctual chance that justice is done...

...glimpsed occasionally, but finally hidden behind the surrogate image of the reporter-rescuer...

...Some unusual casting presents Burt Lancaster as the brutally brilliant columnist, and Tony Curtis, in his best performance, as a greasy pimp of the publicity profession...

...The limitations of exaggeration and therapeutic melodrama, however, are reached at all the points where the people in the theaters do not recognize themselves in the caricatures on the screen...

...In fact, it is appropriate that there be movies and radio and television shows as homeopathic antidotes against the toxic raptures of continual entertainment...

...His dreams of dramatic integrity are ground into box-office hamburger by an unscrupulous, success-serving producer...

...The direction of Scotsman Alexander Mackendrick, known heretofore for delightfully wry comedies like High and Dry, achieves an off-beat, drumming impact—although the rhythms eventually become relentlessly frenetic, as if intended only to mesmerize or fatigue the sensibilities, rather than to stimulate them...

...The face of the crowd, however, is more seriously obscured...

...This image, created, after all, by writers, may be traced to Nineteenth Century ideologies and romanticisms of the role of artists and intellectuals...