The highest rated film on Letterboxd by the Greek maestro of actors and theatre, Elia Kazan. My only run-in with the director previously has been On the Waterfront (1954), which I remember liking a lot but didn't really stick with me besides this famous pile-driver, so impactful it generated Scorsese's only great film and has automatically cemented Kazan in my head as a great director. In A Face in the Crowd (1957), the acting is similarly impressive, but unfortunately, Kazan decided to make a prototype of that yawn-inducing genre, the "prophetic social/political comment." Making a film in such a small mode leaves little room for beauty, only "the message," which in my opinion is better left to the field of journalism.
In this story of the dishonest country bumpkin Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes (Andy Griffith), who captures the hearts and minds of America by simply being an idiot and refusing to apologize for being an idiot ("Trump!" yes, okay, we know), the audience is always afforded a nice elevated platform to look down on this fool and smirkingly shake their heads in comfortable disapproval. The salt in the wound is the moralizing, above-it-all journalist played by Walter Matthau, the one character who sees through him and smugly repeats the film's themes to us, not even letting us take pleasure in this drama of otherwise detestable characters screwing eachother over. Kazan's competency, which produces a few good moments of trashiness, particularly when "Lonesome" is enchanted by an adoring high school girl's baton twirling at a parade, places the film a tier above its incredibly shrill '70s cousin, Network (1976).
Score: 2.5/5 – I am completely unsurprised that Spike Lee loves this film.
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