REMEMBERING MAYBERRY’S LEAD ACTOR
He was the face of small town America past: “He was a far more complicated figure than he appeared. As Sheriff Taylor, he effectively acted as a cultural interpreter for a fast-urbanizing nation reared on, and comforted by, Norman Rockwell imagery. Griffith’s take on a post-Eisenhower ‘‘Our Town’’ made him, to television, what Woody Guthrie had been to music two decades earlier — a popularizer who came from authentic country roots, polished it all up, then fed Americans back a more digestible version of rural culture. It was an approach that coincided with a musical folk revival in which rural songs were being popularized by mainstream musicians like never before.”
–the USA reflects on Andy Griffith‘s passing in the days where the USA was more simple.
Pat Morrison of The LA Times notes:
“Whether it’s doctoring or lawyering or sheriffing or newspapering, the drama has to trump the reality, or there’s no TV show or movie that’s watchable. Just about any journalism movie or TV show, excepting All the President’s Men, has to overcome the essential drama- and conflict-free life of a real reporter, and put characters in ridiculous situations that require them to do outlandish things.
The Andy Griffith show began a month before the election of John F. Kennedy ended the warm-fuzzies of the Eisenhower era, and it went off the air three days before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. In those eight years, the country shook like Deputy Barney Fife’s gun hand. The show used a man with a badge to tell its real stories, about being a good father and a good neighbor and a good citizen, in much the way that The Twilight Zone employed fantasy to serve up verities about the human conscience and human spirit.”–More here.
Ron Howard segue: What I Learned From Andy Griffith.
[Photo caption: Andy Griffith's debut film role starring as Lonesome Rhodes in A Face in the Crowd - UCLA Film and Television Archive--LA Times].
~Posted by Horiwoodblog, Aotearoa New Zealand, Polynesia Asia-Pacific. 7.7.12~
