A Face in the Crowd

Admission is free. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.

A Face in the Crowd

U.S., 1957

“What do I get out of this?” asks Andy Griffith’s “Lonesome” Rhodes of Patricia Neil’s radio producer touring an Arkansas jail for local musical talent. In his rise to fame and influence, Rhodes’ narcissistic motivation remains the same throughout A Face in the Crowd, no matter what Everyman platitudes people project on him. Radio gets him started but television is the new medium that vaults him to the pinnacle of political power. With McCarthyism still in the air, director Elia Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg pitch a darker take on populism than Frank Capra’s in Meet Doe Joe, but they still share a faith in the American public’s natural resistance to authoritarian appeals that, for all the film’s prophetic bone fides, feels naive in retrospect.—Senior Public Programmer Paul Malcolm

35mm, b&w, 126 min. Director: Elia Kazan. Screenwriter: Budd Schulberg. With: Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, Anthony Franciosa. 

35mm preservation print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive with funding provided by The Film Foundation and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.