{"id":1812,"date":"2026-11-09T14:04:20","date_gmt":"2026-11-09T19:04:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/?p=1812"},"modified":"2026-11-09T17:06:57","modified_gmt":"2026-11-09T22:06:57","slug":"a-face-in-the-crowd-thursday-november-12th","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/09\/a-face-in-the-crowd-thursday-november-12th\/","title":{"rendered":"A Face in the Crowd. Thursday, November 12th."},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"padding:56.25% 0 0 0;position:relative;\"><iframe src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/1245200220?badge=0&amp;autopause=0&amp;player_id=0&amp;app_id=58479\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture; clipboard-write; encrypted-media\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;\" title=\"Small Things Like These (2024) trailer\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p><script src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/api\/player.js\"><\/script><\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Director: Elia Kazan \/ Year: 1957 \/ Black and White \/ English language \/ MPA rating: Approved \/ Runtime: 126 min<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Made during the middle slumbers of the Eisenhower era, Elia Kazan&#8217;s <em>A Face in the Crowd <\/em> marks its [70th birthday in 2027] and retains its status as one of the most provocative, unplaceable vagrants\u2014or is it mongrels?\u2014of American moviemaking. It&#8217;s a perennial in-between. It didn&#8217;t behave then, and it doesn&#8217;t quite belong now. It has neither indelibly darkened into a lithographic fable, like Charles Laughton&#8217;s masterwork, <em>The Night of the Hunter<\/em>, nor faded into parchment. As Richard Schickel observes in his gung-ho biography of Kazan, published in 2005, &#8220;The film has never achieved wide popularity, but it has never disappeared, either. It keeps nagging away at us. At some of us, at least.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>A Face in the Crowd<\/em> was and is a satire for the enlightened minority (&#8220;some of us, at least&#8221;) about the threat posed to democracy when TV personalities achieve magnetic sway over the masses and wield their popularity like a whip. If Fascism comes to America, this film suggests, it&#8217;ll be wearing the friendly, donkey grin of a good ol&#8217; boy. Written by Budd Schulberg (who also did the screenplay for Kazan&#8217;s <em>On the Waterfront<\/em>), A Face in the Crowd is a dark-hued tall tale about a rough-diamond charismatic\u2014Andy Griffith&#8217;s singer-joker Lonesome Rhodes\u2014who catapults into national celebrity, only to become the puppet of a populist scheme orchestrated by corporate overlords, who exploit his likability as a lever of social control. Rhodes is no innocent buffoon; he&#8217;s as cynical as his paymasters. He preys upon the yearnings and insecurities of regular folks and plays them for suckers, until he commits career suicide by open mike, the victim of a &#8220;Macaca&#8221; moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>A Face in the Crowd<\/em> might have become an acrid, worrywart exercise in elitist condescension if it hadn&#8217;t been for the seams-busting acting of Griffith, who unleashes a moody, gutsy force unsuitable for the future sheriff of Mayberry; Patricia Neal, as the film&#8217;s abused, bruised conscience; Anthony Franciosa, who has the appetite of a gigolo turned jackal; and, gleaming in her screen debut, Lee Remick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Review by James Wolcott for Vanity Fair &#8211; February 19th 2007<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0050371\/?ref_=nv_sr_1?ref_=nv_sr_1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"44\" height=\"20\" src=\"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/imdb.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-43\"\/><\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Director: Elia Kazan \/ Year: 1957 \/ Black and White \/ English language \/ MPA rating: Approved \/ Runtime: 126 min Made during the middle slumbers of the Eisenhower era, Elia Kazan&#8217;s A Face in the Crowd marks its [70th birthday in 2027] and retains its status as one of the most provocative, unplaceable vagrants\u2014or &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/09\/a-face-in-the-crowd-thursday-november-12th\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">A Face in the Crowd. Thursday, November 12th.<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1815,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-trailers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1812"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1812\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1819,"href":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1812\/revisions\/1819"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}