A Face in the Crowd is a masterful film that is especially worth viewing during election years when as a citizenry we must negotiate the path to picking new leaders - a path that is filled with misdirection and barriers. Elia Kazan, who directed this 1957 film, created a work that was both cynical and illuminating about the way that politics works in the United States. He presents us with a cast of characters who dazzle with personal charisma and use all of the tricks of Madison Avenue to con voters who are not in fact all that difficult to deceive to begin with.
Central to the movie is the character of Lonesome Rhodes, played by Andy Griffith as a conman, a person on the look-out for that one big score. He gets his chance when he meets a radio producer (played by Patricia Neal), who decides to bank on his corn-pone accent and philosophizing. She gets him a spot on local radio and his success there eerily presages the current goings-on on talk radio - as he finds that his particular brand of political wisdom - which is all homily and no substance - plays better the bigger his audience is.
Much of the power of the movie arises from the fact that the character of Rhodes does not change throughout the course of the movie in the sense that he shifts his fundamental values (or acquires values that he does not initially possess). He is a shallow man whose skill lies not in inspiring people to follow their better angels but rather in rousing them to follow their worst instincts. This is certainly one of Kazan's central messages - that a political leader can grow substantially in power and in influence without himself (or herself) growing personally. The only significant way in which the character of Rhodes changes is that he becomes more powerful. The movie shows how it is perfectly possible to build upon small successes in advertising a product - and it does not in any way matter if that product is itself inherently good. In the world...