A Face in the Crowd

Loved by Truffaut, borrowed by Spike Lee, strangely overlooked today, A Face in the Crowd is a prescient film from 1957 that uses the word “influencer”, is worried about demagogues in public life, the corrupting effect of the media and the weird lives of celebrities. It’s directed by Elia Kazan, a man with an eye for for a political meme – he did Gentleman’s Agreement (anti-semitism) and On the Waterfront (union corruption) – and was made five years after he’d testified to the House Unamerican Activities Committee and “named names”. The febrile McCarthyite atmosphere of the times is partly what Kazan and regular writer Budd Schulberg are tilting at in the story of … Read more