A Face in the Crowd

Kazan’s bitter political parable about celebrity culture and the power of mass media.

Written by On the Waterfront’s Budd Schulberg, Kazan’s most explicitly political film centres on work-shy drifter ‘Lonesome’ Rhodes (Andy Griffith), whose gift of the gab – first revealed on an Arkansas local radio show – leads him to fame on national television and, thereby, to political influence. A bitter parable about celebrity culture, populist demagoguery, and the power of mass media, A Face in the Crowd remains all too relevant today.