Andy Griffith will mostly be remembered for his weekly TV series where many of us who were growing up in the 1960s found refuge from the harsh realities of a decade in turmoil. Mayberry was a safe haven from the Vietnam war footage we watched on the Six O’Clock News and the yammering of parents whose tongues were attracting lies like flypaper, the result of licking too many S&H Green Stamps and the asshole of unquestioned authority.
Griffith’s show was hopelessly square but it served its function as a kind of cathode-ray Valium, a chill-out tent for the young and restless, a detour into normalcy for budding freaks suffering from the weight of our personal suburban apocalypse. We cooled our heels in Mayberry until we could get the fuck out of there, leaving the starry-eyed and clueless Opie Taylor, hapless Barney Fife and brain-addled Gomer Pyle eating our hippie dust. We’d stay in touch with Aunt Bee for dope money.
Yes, Andy was the dad we all wanted, a hayseed Buddhist with a southern drawl, dressed in Peace Officer drag, tending a drunk tank that had the serene vibe of a Zen monastery. But there was another side of Andy Griffith, the actor, that presented itself in the darkly prophetic character of Lonesome Rhodes (dig that Kerouacian name) in Elia Kazan’s A Face In The Crowd. Rhodes was a bum and a loser hurled into the role of evangelical huckster and pop star - a deviant Johnny Cash hopped up on some kind of fucked-up moonshine pumped out of backwoods stills, yielding a devil’s brew of fallacious firewater, jugged and labelled with the mugs of L. Ron Hubbard, Mitt Romney and Scott Walker.
Kazan’s film foresees a future, much like the one we have today, in which heroes are villains and shit-kicking rabble-rousers like Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh rule the media roost as a clueless populace feeds at the trough of religion, political propaganda and celebrity worship with the blind allegiance of dumbstruck teenage girls at a Justin Bieber concert.
Here are two clips from A Face In The Crowd in which we encounter the shadow side of the patriarch of Mayberry.
The theme song that sedated a generation.