A Face in the Crowd (1957) (2025)

Popular reviews

• Review by The Voluptuous Horror of Sally Jane Black 5

  It's hard to review a movie like this in terms of its theme, as so much of it was simply spelled out for the viewer. This isn't entirely a flaw, but the tragic rise and fall of Lonesome Rhodes pretty clearly depicts the costs of fame, manipulation, power, and so on. It's a bitter and cynical soul that it lays waste to, eventually, and it suggests baldly that this is what America has become. It's a warning and a cry for help.

  The performance people talk about is Andy Griffith's, which is fair enough. He puts everything into it, giving us a startling intensity that he would later shy away from with his eponymous television show, and his country howl…

• Review by Paul Schrader 1

  The most insidious myth of the movies is the notion that demogoguery, once exposed by the media, would be rejected by the general public. I once believed this.

• Review by Jake Cole ★★★★½

  Having failed to see this movie before the 2016 election, I've put off getting around to it owing to my immense, eye-rolling aversion to the insistence of retrofitting every political piece of American culture, no matter how old, to be "about Trump." Yet there's actual truth to that charge here, albeit not, perhaps, in the way people think. Yes, Lonesome Rhodes is a vulgar brute, a snake-oil salesman who uses a cornpone, man-of-the-people image to mask a purely mercenary narcissist in it for the attention, but the film also pointedly contrasts him against his cultural counterweight, businessmen whose stuffy "dignity" barely hides the same base impulses of control and greed. What A Face in the Crowd posits with shocking insight…

• Review by theriverjordan ★★★★★ 48

  Elia Kazan’s “A Face in the Crowd” is a warning shot close enough to graze the temples of anyone watching. Its piercing reverberations on mass media manipulation still ring in the ears over half a century later.

  “Face” arrived in cinemas two full decades before “Network;” a thematic successor that shares all the malice, but perhaps more technical mastery than its similarly-themed 1957 predecessor.

  Kazan, though, brings a sort of personal pessimism to “Face,” imbuing it with a hostility that seems to have been sloshing around his gullet in the years since he was unable to generate a hit film following his “HUAC” testimony.

  Possibly nursing some bitterness about how his own reputation had undergone a trip through the media…

• Review by eely 👻 ★★★½ 7

  am i...am i attracted to walter matthau

• Review by Drew Clark ★★★★

  This is what happens to a person once they gain over 20 Letterboxd followers

• Review by Kyle Turner ★★★★½ 1

  when Andy Griffith calls himself "an influencer", my stomach plummeted.

• Review by Lara Pop ★★★★ 26

  A Face in the Crowd is like standing alone in a crowd and finishing a cigarette in under a minute, then light-headedly glancing at the last cloud of cigarette smoke, wondering where it all went wrong. It is like thinking 'ahh, screw it', and moving your nicotine-caked fingers to take a new cigarette out of the pack, only to realize that it was your last one. The wings of the American Dream can lift you only so high. Your career will soar, but the person you once were will slowly wither inside. Money and fame's charming glitter will fade to expose the naked rottenness underneath, and you'll suddenly be afraid.

  Only then will you realize that you were never more…

• Review by Will Sloan ★★★★★

  This is how my own career as a public figure will end.

• Review by Graham ★★★★½ 2

  I didn't read anything about this before watching, and when the titles kicked in had a horrid feeling this was going to be one of those crusty old westerns, full of doddery old men with 'ceeegars' and anxious maids.

  Nope.

  A Face in the Crowd is pure unadulterated joy, and if you're feeling a little blue or down in the dumps I'd highly recommend a dose of what it has to offer.

  It starts nice enough, but as soon as we meet Larry 'Lonesome' Rhodes, the happy gas flicks to 10!

  For any of you that have seen this, I'll say one word. Vitajex. That whole scene was absolute sunshine and a glory to behold. While I really enjoyed Andy…

• Review by Josh Gillam ★★★★½ 2

  This incendiary story about social influencers, populist rabble-rousing and the fleeting (yet impactful) nature of fame has only become more relevant as time’s gone on, centred around a folksy “man of the people” (played by Andy Griffith) who reaches the top—only for his own hubris to cause everything to crumble around him.

  Writer Budd Schulberg based this story on a number of actual cases, and Lonesome Rhodes’ meteoric “famous for being famous” rise & fall feels like a parallel to multiple real life people in the public eye (both before and long after this came out), the character assembling a devoted fanbase before buying into his own hype and losing what connected him to them in the first place.

  Griffith brings…

• Review by Lowe McKee 18

  There’s venom in that booming laugh. Hatred in those smiling eyes. But it’s that tongue of his. He knows how to say exactly what we want to hear. Isn’t he somethin?

  Not just an entertainer. An influence, a wielder of opinion. A force.

  I don’t need to read any other reviews to know exactly who Lonesome Rhodes makes you think of. Andy Griffith’s larger than life performance, the meteoric rise of this political outsider, the rabidly devoted followers… had I seen this a decade ago, I might’ve thought this movie was a bit too absurd, over the top, unrealistic. Who was I kidding?

  This is far more than just an indictment of the manipulative media. Hell, the man tells us…