Great. Really great. Deserves wider recognition, because as a study of power and populism it's up there with "Citizen Kane".No, Elia Kazan didn't have Orson Welles' dazzling technical brilliance (though there's a wonderful natural feel of being onstage with the performers throughout), but he was very much an actor's director and brings some spectacular performances to the screen here.I'm a child of the early '60s, so I grew up with The Andy Griffith Show, Mayberry RFD, and Matlock. I'd experienced many, many stories on TV with Andy Griffith, and he was a comfortable, familiar presence. Maybe the best compliment I can pay this film and his performance in it was that I quickly forgot he was Andy Griffith at all.Griffith's character of "Lonesome" Rhodes is honestly a performance for the ages. He's by turns charming, pitiful, and terrifying as he quickly ascends from an Arkansas county drunk tank to become a powerful media presence. The story is plotted conveniently but Griffith is utterly believable through the entire climb.Though Rhodes is the focus of the story, there's a great surrounding ensemble, too. The great Walter Mattheau has a strong supporting role as one of Rhodes' writers who eventually becomes disillusioned, and Patricia Neal is fantastic as the reporter who brings attention to Rhodes to begin with and tries to follow him all the way up. The performances are all amazing.Some personal speculation: I understand that Kazan was very demanding on Griffith during shooting, and that Griffith's experience on set was dark and difficult. His subsequent, more prosaic television career may well have been shaped by a desire to atone for his performance here.Kazan did this movie following his classic "On the Waterfront", and perhaps it's overshadowed unfairly. It's a great story of power, populism and corruption and deserves to be known more widely.

In 1957, "A Face in the Crowd" was conceived as a social satire, but in a modern context, it's a horror movie--horrifying for the simple fact that so much of it has become true. When parody melts off the screen and takes the shape of reality, reality should hop off a cliff and reassemble itself.Patricia Neal is Marcia "short for marshmallow" Jefferies, a radio journalist with a program called "A Face in the Crowd," in which she goes to ordinary places, turns on the microphone and lets ordinary people speak, sing or do whatever--think Alan Lomax. She comes across Larry Rhodes--whom she dubs "Lonesome"--(Andy Griffth), ramblin' man in both the oratory and traveling sense--think Woody Guthrie with personality.Lonesome is an instant media sensation, due to his fiery nature, brazen vernacular and woodsy charm. He spouts spittoon wisdom and pounds out half-baked folk songs; despite not doing anything perfect or proper, people sense his authenticity and eat it up. As happens when a bolt of lightening appears, businessmen everywhere hold up a jar in hopes of catching it. Before long, Lonesome is headlining television, having boats and mountains named after him and even becomes campaign advisory to the likely future president--thanks to Lonesome's help, of course. The film is a scathing indictment of celebrity culture, the media and the growing reliance of politics not on policy, but reliability. The film is more relevant today than it ever was--reality T.V., the invasion of media out of our living room and into our pockets, candidates going on SNL--and will probably grow in relevance as time goes on. Also on display is the entertainment industry's tendency to take something real and raw and cook it to a charred, black shell of its formal self--milking every last cent before moving on to the next thing.In a performance that could have been overplayed, Griffith takes the character to the furthest extreme without quite going over the edge. Like the audience inside the film, the audience outside the film's relationship with Lonesome is the same: he starts out charming and honest, but after power in introduced and his backwoods charm is perverted, he turns into a plastic version of himself, and both audiences turn against him. It's up to Griffith to pull off the subtle transformation without really changing the character; that he does. As Griffith gets the showier performance, it's easy to lose sight of the supporting characters, or even the co-lead, Patricia Neal, who's great as the bookish, regretful inventor of Lonesome--she's almost Oppenheimer-like--who gets suckered in just like everyone else. One of my all-time favorite cinematic pinch-hitters, Walter Matthau plays a writer commissioned to Lonesome. He's not so much the conscience of the film, but rather its brain ("All mild men are vicious. They hate themselves for being mild, and they hate the windy extroverts whose violence seems to have a strange attraction for nice girls who should know better").Among the upper-echelon of media mocking, "Ace in the Hole," "Network,"--both of which have become fact in one way or another-- sits comfortably "A Face in the Crowd." It shines a spotlight onto the dark side of entertainment, creating a "Scarface" for the media world, only more terrifying.

Following up director Elia Kazan and writer Budd Schulberg sensational Best Picture winning On The Waterfront, the Academy really missed the mark by snubbing the equally worthy A Face In The Crowd. That said, they missed it again in a similar case with Sidney Lumet's Network, albeit a film that won its fair share of awards. Satires about media storms and how popularity is power regardless of virtues feel like valuable relics to look back on and go 'huh, nothing's really changed.' We're in a cycle of rise and falls. A Face In The Crowd is one of the most dynamic examples, pulling Andy Griffith from the streets and letting his charisma hypnotize the world. Indeed, life imitates art as this is Griffith's debut and he would later star in his own popular TV show. The screenplay is quite procedural detailing Lonesome's rise and fall, but every scene knocks it up a notch to the point where he has influence over the next presidential election. It's a film that rivals Waterfront in how captivating it is. Half the credit goes to the astonishing performances from Griffith and co- star Patricia Neal. This film remains a sharp potent eye on the bleak state of the media and society's tendency for hero worship.9/10

***SPOILERS*** Years ahead of its time movie in how the American public can be manipulated, like it is today, by a smooth talking demigod who uses the electronic media of radio & televising to fool it into thinking that he or she, with women now so prominent in US politics,is the greatest kindest and most of all righteous person that ever walked the face of the universe. That's until feeling invincible as well as all powerful he slips up and is exposed like the main character of the movie Larry Lonesome Rhodes, Andy Griffith, and forced against his will to face the hard reality, or Karma, of his sleazy and immoral actions.Discovered at a jail house drunk tank by local radio personality Marcia Jeffries, Patricia Neal,in rural Arkansas the home of the former Prsident of the United States William Jefferson "Slick Willie" Clinton Larry right away with his boyish good looks so impressed her in his folksy delivery and skill of playing the guitar the Marcia quickly saw in him a combination of a Will Rogers and Hank Williams and puts him on the radio as soon as he dried himself out. Not at first interested in his new found fame Larry or Lonesome soon discovered that he can get people to buy products as well as later elect politicians by just putting in a good word for them on his talk & country & western music hillbilly radio/TV show. The people including Marcia that are behind Lonesome's incredible rise in the TV ratings and popularity never once notice that he was anything but the lovable country bumpkin that he made himself out to be but a Frankenstein monster!***SPOILERS*** IT was in fact Marcia who had fallen in love with the big jerk who was hurt in the most personal way by Lonesome dropping her for this young teenage chickadee the baton twirling Betty Lou Fleckum, Lee Remick, whom he also dropped after he got, as in with so many other women in his life, tired of her. Seething with both hatred and revenge as well as feeling hurt & deserted Marcia planned to show the real Lonesome Rhodes to the public, who are just crazy about him, for what he really is. And this came on rating week or sweeps for TV & radio with tens of millions of his fans and admirers tuning in to see and hear their hero.Like the saying goes "It's a dirty job but someone's got to do it" and Marcia's exposer of Lonesome, when he thought no one was listening in, was anything but pretty. Within minutes of the big show going off the air thousands of outraged listeners as well as it's sponsors, by canceling their sponsorship of his show, showed Lonesome just what they think about him! Not quit getting the picture in how badly he screwed himself up Lonesome in his rage to get the person who left the mike on when the shows credits were rolling down the TV screen was shocked to find out that the person that he trusted the most, even though he treated her like dirt, who was responsible for his sudden downfall was non other then Marcia Jeffries! What I got from the ending is that Lonesome Rhodes was so popular that the millions who tuned into his show didn't at the time bother to turn it off in being so impressed by it! Even in the last minute or so when it was going off the air which in the end made the greatest impact, in seeing or hearing what a low life creep he really was, on them!