Film

A Face in the Crowd

Name: A Face in the Crowd
Genre: Drama
Released: 1957
Cast: Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, Anthony Franciosa, Walter Matthau, Lee Remick

Andy Griffith, later America's favorite sheriff, plays Lonesome Rhodes, a drifter plucked from an Arkansas jail cell and turned into a TV sensation—then a kingmaker, then a monster. Kazan and Schulberg's satire is loud, sweaty and genuinely frightening: it watches folksy charisma curdle into demagoguery in real time. Sixty-plus years on, it feels less like a period piece than a warning label.

TMDb rating

7.6

If you liked this

Network1976

Ten years later, Lumet and Chayefsky took the same rotten idea—television turning a man's breakdown into a ratings bonanza—and made it even angrier and funnier. Howard Beale is Rhodes's mirror image, burning out instead of building up.

But The satire is so pointed it occasionally forgets to be a story; some scenes play like op-eds with actors.

All the King's Men1949

Broderick Crawford's Oscar-winning turn as a backwoods populist who discovers his own power is the closest cinematic cousin to Lonesome Rhodes—same trajectory, same rot underneath the charm.

But Its pacing and moralizing are very much of their era; it can feel stagey next to Kazan's rawer style.

Elmer Gantry1960

Burt Lancaster is electric as a con-man revivalist who sells salvation the way Rhodes sells folksy authenticity—both men discover the crowd will believe anything if you're loud enough.

But It leans harder into melodrama and religious satire, which won't appeal if you wanted something closer to media criticism.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Meet John Doe1941

Sixteen years before Kazan, Capra told nearly the same story from the opposite emotional angle: a nobody built by newspapermen into a beloved populist mouthpiece who must decide whether to become what they made him. Same engine, sunnier chassis.

It's the sentimental version of Rhodes's rise—Gary Cooper's drifter is manufactured by a cynical press exactly the way Rhodes is, and watching Capra wrestle his own optimism against that cynicism is fascinating.

But Capra's instinct is to rescue his hero and his audience with uplift; if you want Kazan's total nerve, the ending here will feel like a cop-out.

Citizen Kane1941

The granddaddy of American media-mogul stories—Kane builds an empire out of image and appetite, and Welles shows you exactly how hollow that kind of power feels from the inside.

But It's more interested in the tragedy of one man's isolation than in the crowd he manipulates; the politics are backdrop, not subject.

The Insider1999

A slower, more procedural look at what television does to truth and to the people who bring it to air—Pacino and Crowe make corporate cowardice as gripping as any thriller.

But It's a legal-corporate drama at heart, not a character study; if you wanted Rhodes-style charisma, this trades it for quiet dread.

Wag the Dog1997

A pitch-black comedy about manufacturing a war for the cameras—faster, meaner and funnier than Kazan's film, but built on the same cynicism about what television can make people believe.

But It's broader and sillier by design; if you want the queasy realism of Face in the Crowd, this satire's cartoonish edges might feel too safe.

Bulworth1998no page yet

Warren Beatty plays a politician who starts telling the ugly truth on camera and becomes a sensation for it—a strange, funny inversion of Rhodes's folksy lies turning into mass adoration.

But Its tone lurches between broad comedy and genuine social commentary in a way some viewers find more baffling than sharp.

Nightcrawler2014

Jake Gyllenhaal's ghoulish stringer understands, like Rhodes, that the camera rewards whoever is willing to go furthest—the same media hunger, stripped of any folksy charm at all.

But It's a much colder, nastier film with almost no warmth to balance the darkness; not for anyone wanting charisma alongside horror.

The Candidate1972

Robert Redford's idealistic lawyer gets remade into an electable product piece by piece—a quieter, more clinical look at the machinery Rhodes exploits from the other side of the camera.

But It ends on ambiguity rather than catastrophe; if you want Kazan's full moral reckoning, this stops short of it.

The Act of Killing2012

Rhodes performs folksy authenticity for the cameras until he starts believing his own act. This documentary follows real Indonesian death-squad leaders who cheerfully reenact their killings for a film crew, performing their own mythology with the same camera-ready self-regard—only the stakes are genocide, not ratings.

It's one of the most unsettling things ever put on film: perpetrators of mass murder staging their crimes as movie scenes, entirely unbothered by the camera's presence, sometimes even proud.

But This isn't entertainment in any normal sense—it's a genuinely disturbing, morally vertiginous experience, and it earns every bit of that discomfort.

UnREAL2015

Flip the camera around: instead of watching a Rhodes-type charm a nation, you watch the producers—burnt-out, brilliant, morally compromised—manufacture emotional spectacle out of real people for a dating show. Same manipulation machine Kazan exposed, just wearing lip gloss and running on Bachelor money.

A trashy, sharp, very funny takedown of reality TV production from people who clearly worked in it—Shiri Appleby and Constance Zimmer are fantastic as women who despise themselves and are great at their jobs anyway.

But It's soapy and pulpy where Kazan is grim and moral; if you want gravity rather than gossip, this will feel like a different species entirely.