Sunday | August 23, 2009 7:00 pm

A Face in the Crowd

Screening on Film

Directed by Elia Kazan.
With Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, Anthony Franciosa.
US, 1957, 35mm, black & white, 125 min.
Print source: UCLA

Budd Schulberg and Kazan reunited to adapt Schulberg's own cautionary tale about the manipulative and treacherous potential of television and advertising as political tools. Misunderstood at the time, and badly wounded at the box office, A Face in the Crowd seems uncannily prescient in its depiction of right-wing extremism cloaking itself as all-American cracker-barrel folksiness.Kazan's successful and highly unconventional casting of untested comedians and character actors—Dunn in Tree, Mostel in Panic—reached its apogee in his ingenious selection of stand-up comic Andy Griffith, in his first feature film, as Lonesome Rhodes, the hayseed populist transformed into an ultimately uncontrollable televisual sensation.