A Face in the Crowd (1957)
Directed by Elia Kazan
The rise of a raucous hayseed named Lonesome Rhodes from itinerant Ozark guitar picker to local media rabble-rouser to TV superstar and political king-maker. Marcia Jeffries is the innocent Sarah Lawrence girl who discovers the great man in a back-country jail and is the first to fall under his spell.
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What critics compared A Face in the Crowd to
Joe Morgenstern, the film critic for the Wall Street Journal, has compared Beatty’s performance to Andy Griffith’s in “A Face in the Crowd,” and the comparison is apt: a folksy facade masking instinctive ruthlessness.
Chief among them is Lotso (Ned Beatty), a plush, strawberry-scented huggie-bear who’s a little too reminiscent of Andy Griffith in “A Face in the Crowd.’’
As a media-dominated (or decimated, take your pick) society, we've rocketed way past A Face in the Crowd, beyond Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, and into some creepy, white-hot, prechopped, overshot, stage-managed hyperversion of world and national events.
As sociopolitical satire, the movie was decades ahead of its time, even scooping 1976’s Network.
Fosse's "Chicago," which he created with John Kander and Fred Ebb, is often marked for its darkly cynical attitude toward the media and celebrity, a cynicism which holds true only for those who have never seen plays like "The Front Page" or films like "A Face in the Crowd."
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(Kevin Rahm — Ted on Mad Men — plays the colleague of Russo’s who watches in horror, tsk-tsking, the role a fixture in politically barbed melodramas like A Face in the Crowd.)