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Originally Posted by Mouldy Old Schmo
Griffith did several TV movies in the 1970s in which he attempted to break out of typecasting. Pray for the Wildcats (1974) with William Shatner and Robert Reed being the most notorious. To me, Griffith just wasn't believable playing bad guys. Even watching him in his movie debut A Face in the Crowd is a strange experience.
INSP Network shows Matlock reruns and I have watched a few of them. I did watch some episodes in its original run. Now I think the show is lame. The plots are ridiculous and Andy Griffith seemed older than he actually was.
Griffith was definitely cut from a different cloth than many other actors. He didn't hang around much with the Hollywood crowd or seek publicity. He gave few interviews and seemed ill at ease doing them. He was married three times, suggesting he could have been hard to get along with on a personal level. Regardless, he entertained us for better and worse. RIP Andy.
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By the time he did those movies in the '70's, Andy was pretty much cast in stone as good-guy Sheriff Taylor, so it would have been difficult for audiences to accept him as a bad guy. In some of those movies his characters were downright evil. I'm guessing that the idea was to really obliterate the Sheriff Taylor image, but to me, having Andy play fearsome villains just clashed with the nice-guy image way too much. It might have worked better if someone had tried to cast him as a bad guy, but a bad guy with some complexity. At least then you might have been able to see something human in his character that would have bridged the gap between Sheriff Taylor and a bad-guy image.
Lonesome Rhodes was something else, though. That was a very interesting, complicated character. Egotistical and despicable, but somehow also sympathetic in a sad way. I think the difficulty in seeing A Face in the Crowd anytime since The Andy Griffith Show might be that Andy's good-guy image was so profoundly established after The . . . Show that it could be difficult to picture him as any character who wasn't fundamentally likeable. Still, I saw A Face . . . just a couple of years ago, the one and only time I've seen it, and Lonesome Rhodes worked for me. I think maybe it was because the character had that kind of gap-bridging complexity which I pointed out above was missing from the villains in those '70's movies.
Of course Andy did get his one chance to play a bad guy successfully in Spy Hard. I thought it was a so-so movie except for a few really funny moments scattered through the plot, but Andy was great doing a comical portrayal of a totally evil villain. I enjoyed that all the more because I got the feeling that he really had fun playing the role.
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