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Following Andy Griffith's passing Tuesday, many people are remembering his role in Elia Kazan's 1957 film A Face in the Crowd both for his great performance as Lonesome Rhodes, a demagogic populist media personality and for the way Budd Schulberg's script predicted the rise of Glenn Beck.

"Andy Griffith channels Glenn Beck in 1957," tweeted New York and Vanity Fair contributing editor Joe Hagan, who included a video that begins to explain the comparison. In it, Griffith's drifter-turned-media darling Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes describes his scheme to help elect a senator running for president so he can earn a place in the administration:

Discovered by a do-gooder reporter while sleeping off in a bender in a drunk tank, Rhodes turns his charming "every man" spiel into a career that eventually brings him a national television show. Quickly Rhodes becomes a demagogue, making and breaking politicians and businesses, drunk on power as he spews a populist message but is secretly contemptuous of his viewers. Here's another clip in the trailer, also making the rounds today, that shows Rhodes talking behind the backs of his fans:

The Lonesome Rhode-as-modern-day omen comparisons began decades later. In 1990, director Elia Kazan said Rhodes foreshadowed Ronald Reagan's rise. As television and cable news grew up, the comparisons grew stronger. James Wolcott revisited the film in Vanity Fair in 2007 and described how the morality tale didn't take quite as well in the early days of television as it did later, when Griffith's ominous personality grew more familiar:

While contemporary reviewers scoffed at the prospect of a hayseed fireball like Lonesome Rhodes becoming a national sensation, Kazan-Schulberg's depiction of the packaging and marketing of fake authenticity now looks prophetic, if a trifle overcooked ... The militant gullibility and brassy confidence of today's elite opinion-makers produce more harm and folly than anything conjured in A Face in the Crowd. Because they possess influence. They're professional dupes.

By 2008, these "professional dupes" had a star among them in Beck. The New Yorker's Nancy Franklin made the most elegant case for comparing Lonesome Rhodes to Beck in her 2009 review of Beck's Fox News show. She begins subtly by emphasizing Beck's similarities to Rhodes without mention of the latter character. "[L]ike many an egomaniac throughout history, [Beck] takes pains to present himself as a regular guy, shrugging his shoulders and saying, 'But what do I know?'" She adds: "Beck looks cherubic, with his boyish crewcut, his rubbery, expressive face, his wide eyes, and his seemingly innocent smile, but he has a wizened heart and a sulfurous outlook on American life and politics." She hammers home the point by emphasizing these details -- his repackaging and his appearance in contrast with his vitriolic personality -- in Rhodes's character when she finally brings up the film:

At the end of the Elia Kazan–Budd Schulberg movie “A Face in the Crowd,” the Arkansas opportunist and petty criminal who has been repackaged, by a radio broadcaster, as a guitar-playing professional hayseed called Lonesome Rhodes (played brilliantly by Andy Griffith), and who has been consumed and ruined by fame, shows his true colors when he bad-mouths his audience over an open mike. The nation abandons him, and, as the movie ends, he’s shouting, unheard, into the night. These days, because of the Internet, it’s not so easy to get rid of a demagogue. Long after Beck leaves radio and TV, his sound bites will still be with us."

In commenting on the film's prescience, she shows some foresight of her own by predicting Beck's post-Fox career as a host of a subscription-based show streamed over the Web. Beck's show remains alive on the Internet.