A Face in the Crowd

Friday, April 15 - Sunday, April 17, 2016

35mm print!

Chosen by Joe S., Projectionist

“It’s been half a century since A FACE IN THE CROWD had its premiere, but there’s a sense in which this 1957 Elia Kazan flick remains the founding movie of postmodern times. Election years make it only too evident that our popular culture and electoral politics are symbiotic; A FACE IN THE CROWD was the first to dramatize it.

“…A FACE IN THE CROWD has never ceased to be relevant. Darkly alluded to during the 1960 campaign (decided, so people thought, by a television debate), it was quasi-remade as Wild in the Streets, American International’s contribution to the madness of 1968, re-released (with a nod to George Wallace) in 1972, invoked to explain Watergate in 1974, and reconfigured as Nashville in 1975.

“In the ’80s, Kazan began saying that he and Schulberg had made a movie about Ronald Reagan back in the days when Reagan was still shilling for GE. Although Reagan’s election might have rendered A FACE IN THE CROWD passé, the idea of a remake was floated throughout his presidency. Afterward, it simply became conventional wisdom. No great stretch of the imagination is required to see Lee Atwater as George H.W. Bush’s Lonesome Rhodes or Ross Perot as a Rhodes knockoff—and only a mild sense of tabloid melodrama is necessary to appreciate Hillary playing Patricia Neal to Bill’s Andy Griffith (now vice versa). To watch Bush II work his down-home magic on a preselected crowd is to be reminded of Rhodes’s modus operandi. More recently, A FACE IN THE CROWD can seem to presage the media-manufactured candidacy and TV-honed persona of failed hopeful Senator Fred Thompson. I asked Schulberg if he saw another Arkansas fellow traveler in the 2008 race: ‘Huckabee has some touches,’ he replied.The fact is that A FACE IN THE CROWD is not about any one person so much as a particular system that brings everything together—politics, news, and entertainment—in the democracy of the market. The movie is still ‘pretty on target,’ Schulberg says. ‘With the right charisma and the right message, it could still happen here.’ It could and it does.” -J. Hoberman, Village Voice

IFC Center does not generally provide advisories about subject matter or potentially triggering content in films, as sensitivities vary from person to person. In addition to the synopses, trailers and other links on our website, further information about content and age-appropriateness for specific films can be found on Common Sense Media, IMDb and DoesTheDogDie.com as well as through general internet searches.