The Worst Film Ever

Overrated and overhyped

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

I don't know if TCM intentionally "counterprogrammed" the Trump inauguration by scheduling Elia Kazan's film about a faux-populist demagogue on the same day as the ceremony, but it sure looks like it, and I approve. Like Trump, A Face in the Crowd's Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes (Andy Griffith) is a product of the media's amoral pursuit of the colorful character, a man lifted to uncommon power by those entertained by the flamboyance and vulgarity. Rhodes (perhaps like Trump) isn't so much the villain of Budd Schulberg's story and screenplay as are his enablers, Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal) and Mel Miller (Walter Matthau), and his exploiters, like Joey DePalma (Anthony Franciosa), who enrich themselves while discovering the previously untapped potential of mass media. In 1957, this potential was just beginning to be realized, but 60 years later it had taken a dangerous man to the White House. I don't think Kazan and Schulberg fully realized that possibility, just as Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky didn't fully realize the prescience of Network (Lumet, 1976). Both films should serve as a permanent warning that today's satire is tomorrow's nightmare. A Face in the Crowd is an important film without being a great one. Schulberg's screenplay falls apart in the middle, and the denouement in which Marcia somehow comes to her senses and exposes Rhodes as a fraud is awkward and mechanical, largely because Marcia herself is something of a mechanical character. An actress of considerable skill, Neal does what she can to make the character live, but the words aren't there in the script to explain why she tolerates Rhodes's fraudulence as long as she does. Matthau and Franciosa come off a little better because their roles are written as stereotypes: Cynical Writer and Go-getting Hot Shot. So the film really belongs to Griffith, who parlays his dead-eyed shark's grin into something that should have been the foundation of a career with more highlights than a folksy sitcom and an old-fart detective show. It's a charismatic but ragged performance that needed a little more shaping from writer and director, something that Kazan admitted to himself in his diaries when he wrote about Rhodes and the film, "The complexity ... was left out." Rather than having Rhodes revealed as a fraud to his followers, Kazan said, Rhodes should have been allowed to recognize that he had been trapped his own fraudulence. Deprived of anagnorisis, a moment of tragic self-recognition, Rhodes becomes a figure of melodrama, bellowing "Marcia!" from the balcony at the end but probably fated to make what Miller suggests to him, the comeback of a has-been. Fortunately, Kazan and Schulberg were wise enough to change their original ending, in which Rhodes commits suicide -- there's not enough tragedy in their conception of the character for that. (charlesmatthews.blogspot.com)

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.

A Face in the Crowd is about the rise of television personality called Lonesome Rhodes played by Andy Griffiths. We first meet him in jail. He is discovered by a producer played by Patricia Neal, who sets him on the road to stardom.His appeal is that he is "authentic", a real man of the people. He talks like them, he knows what they like and what they don't like. He soon rises in popularity and even more sinister, his influence grows. Politicians soon appear on his TV show, eager to be seen with him. The power and the fame goes to his head.Apart from Griffiths, who is amazing in this, look out for a young Lee Remick, Anthony Franciosa and Walter Matthau. Patricia Neal is great as the woman who realises that she has created a monster.She is the first to spot what lurks beneath the easy going facade.Bear in mind that this film was released before reality TV and you will be amazed at how prophetic it is. The film also touches on the dangers of populism and how a demagogue can poison political debate via the medium of television. It also demonstrates how fleeting TV fame can be. Please watch this film. It may be a black and white movie from the 1950s , but it has so much to say about our culture in the 21st century.

***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!