Larry Lonesome Rhodes (Andy Griffith) is a drifter and drunk from rural Arkansas who is accidentally found in prison by radio host Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal). On a local radio station in rural northeast Arkansas, he hosts a show where he hosts regular, average people, and this immediate chatterbox, guitar-wielding drunk will turn into an instant star. Everything Lonesome says and does will be real music to the audience’s ears and very soon he will understand what people like and he will become extremely popular and adored overnight. Through local radio, he will move to a bigger radio and then to television, and soon he will become a national star, but it will turn out that Lonesome is not such a fool as he likes to be.
When Marcia realizes that she has released a genie from a bottle that can be very dangerous and that she has created a real monster, it may already be too late, and this great satire by the legendary Elia Kazan is as relevant today as it was in the late fifties when it was filmed. Lonesome could also be described as a forerunner of today’s reality stars, influencers, a guy who knows how to appeal to the masses and who, as it turns out, is ready to use his power and influence for anyone who is willing to pay him more. In the mid-fifties, Kazan was perhaps the most important and sought-after director who discovered Marlon Brando and James Dean, and “A Face in the Crowd” followed the incredibly successful “On the Docks of New York” and “East of Paradise.”
This time, Kazan discovered Griffith, whose role in Lonesome was the first in his career, and besides him, this film was also the debut of the then young Lee Remick, who will become the young wife of the main character here. “A Face in the Crowd” is also Kazan’s most politically engaged film, and it is a perfect satire that was partly designed to show and warn the audience about the potential power of television, which at that time was becoming an increasingly popular medium. It is a film that brilliantly shows how marketing works and how, with good marketing, various ideas and messages can be sold to the audience without any problems, and a simple peasant and a man from the people whom everyone considers one of their own, ordinary, average people, seems like the perfect channel for that.