It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man who hosts a talk show in the media must be a son of a bitch. In subsequent years (1956/57) half a century ago we were treated to hatchet jobs on a radio (The Great Man) and TV (A Face In The Crowd) host, both of whom bore a striking resemblance to the real Arthur Godfrey and both adapted from respectively a novel (The Great Man) and a short story (Your Arkansas Traveller) by two fine writers, Al Morgan and Budd Schulberg, both of whom adapted their original works for the screen. We never got to see Herb Fuller, the radio personality, because he was killed off-screen at the start of The Great Man and Jose Ferrer (who also directed the movie) was assigned to do a memorial tribute during which time he discovered just how big a son of a bitch the late Herb Fuller actually was. Lonesome Rhodes on the other hand was very much alive in the person of Andy Griffith in Gadg's A Face In The Crowd and turned out to be just as obnoxious as Fuller, hardly surprising since, as noted, both were based on Arthur Godfrey, who worked in both radio and television. It was a while before someone opened this same can of peas again and Talk Radio is essentially The Great Man/A Face In The Crowd with the f-word. This doesn't necessarily make it bad, merely repetitive and though the screenplay is good as far as it goes no one is seriously going to compare it with the top-drawer Morgan and Schulberg or if they do they risk being laughed out of Pretentious School. In Talk Radio's favor is the fact that its target audience would have barely been around at the time the two superior films were released and if you haven't seen - or possibly even heard of - either then Talk Radio talks a good game. Worth catching as a freebie with a newspaper but not shelling out for on DVD.
Review of Talk Radio
