TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Ezmae Chang This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Murtaza Ali Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd is a naked portrait of fame and what it can do to a man in the absence of morality. It is not just a film but a prophecy that's more relevant today then ever. Many who have watched the film would feel that Kazan predicted the rise of Donald J. Trump more than 50 years in advance. Demagoguery today sells like hot cakes and A Face In The Crowd presents a haunting take on how television serves as the perfect conduit for its propagation.The film revolves around a fast talking country boy named Lonesome Rhodes who goes on to become a television sensation who is sought after by advertisers, business magnates and politicians. Rhodes, in his own words, is 'not just an entertainer, but an influence, a welder of opinion, a force'. But since it was the '50s driven by the idealistic belief that morality must ultimately triumph, Lonesome's larger than life story could not be completed without dichotomizing his meteoric rise with his great fall. Kazan's visionary direction is brilliantly complimented by Andy Griffith who delivers one of the greatest performances in all cinema only to be snubbed by The Academy. The film also features an unforgettable performance from Patricia Neal who steals almost every scene she features in. The passion that the two of them exude in the scenes they are together is something that most actors of today would struggle to achieve even after resorting to nudity.'A Face in the Crowd' is a reminder of what Hollywood once stood for. It is really heartbreaking to see what Hollywood has been reduced to today. There was a time it focused on real stories of substance that told so much about the different sides of humanity: the virtues, the vices and the follies. Those stores served as great lessons on morality, hypocrisy and hubris. Today all Hollywood seems capable of offering are endless superhero franchises, high on style but with little substance. It is high time the creatively and emotionally bankrupt Studio Bosses revisited a film like 'A Face in the Crowd'.For more on the world of cinema, please visit my film site "A Potpourri of Vestiges".

antcol8 It's Twilight Zone. With all that implies, both good and bad. That style of the '50s, where this little cabal of oh - so - smart Liberal screenplay writers impose their critiques of Big Business and Madison Avenue on any consistency of created characters. So it becomes a kind of soapbox. I might agree with all of it - why not? But it's not good cinema - everything is just way too spelled out. Liberalism has failed - it degenerated into Neoliberalism. And yet,we all need to watch this film. It presages the Trump era brilliantly (not that he was the first, by any means, to work the liminal space between Show Biz and Politics). So it's a great document. And it's also an episode of the Zone expanded into 2 hours. But part of the greatness of, say, The Monsters are Due on Maple Street is its 1/2 hour length. Andy Griffith is good here. But, you know me...I would've preferred Claude Akins.Walter Matthau's monologue about Marcia and about his book - in fact, that whole section of the film - is dreadful. Overwritten and tin - eared. Patricia Neal starts the film out so beautifully - somebody else here called her performance "luminous" - and as the writing goes down the drain, so does her performance. Down, down, into pseudo - Tennessee Williams territory:"Marcia!"Watch the first hour with both eyes on the screen. And for the second one, keep one eye on the film while perusing, say, a Huey Long biography with the other eye.The ending? King Lear meets The Obsolete Man. That says what it says.I wonder what would've happened if those Kazans and Schulbergs and Chayefskys, etc. could've interrogated and implicated their own Liberal Allrightnik sensibilities? Then Auto - Derision wouldn't be a term only used in French.

charlesem 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)

tieman64 Released in 1957, Elia Kazan's "A Face in the Crowd" stars Andy Griffith as Larry Rhodes, a fast-talking drifter who's hired by the producer of a small-town radio show. As the plain-speaking Rhodes appeals to listeners, he quickly becomes famous, and thus a powerful marketing tool.Pre-dating "Network" (1976) by almost two decades, "Crowd" reveals a world in which newspaper, radio and television have become powerful tools of manipulation. Rhodes is not only used as a pawn to push products, but political candidates as well, Kazan anticipating the rise of a new breed of political pundits, folksy "everymen" used by those in power to sell lies to the masses. Kazan's films have often been about the pitfalls of "success". If films like "On the Waterfront", "America, America" and "Viva Zapata!" observe the struggles of social climbers, fare like "The Arrangement", "The Last Tycoon" and "A Face in the Crowd" are explicitly about "success stories" who become painfully disillusioned. Rhodes himself shifts from a man who wanted little to do with money, power or politics, to a man who embodies everything he once detested. Selling products and political candidates on television, Rhodes then begins to despise his many fans and viewers; he deems them simple-minded dupes. Earlier in the film, others condescendingly viewed Rhodes the same way."You gotta be a saint to stand all the power that little box gives you," a character played by Walter Matthau states. It's a lesson Rhodes soon learns. By the film's second half, media, advertising, capitalism and politics have become a messy entanglement from which Rhodes is unable escape. Everything has become a game of surfaces, sales and deceit, and when audience faith in Rhodes collapses, he's ejected from the game."A Face in the Crowd" was ignored upon release, but has since come to be regarded as one of Kazan's masterpieces. Though very heavy-handed, it remains a prophetic, funny and fast little film. Expertly acted by Andy Griffith and Patricia Neal.8.9/10 - See Wilder's "Ace in the Hole".