A FACE IN THE CROWD 1957, dir. Elia Kazan

Patricia Neal in A FACE IN THE CROWD (1957) dir. Elia Kazan

Holly Warburton, Charlotte Ager, Salman Toor, Khaled Hourani, Vyara Boyadjieva, Haruki Murakami ("Sputnik Sweetheart")

ANDY GRIFFITH as LARRY “LONESOME” RHODES in A FACE IN THE CROWD (1957)

Dear Alsius,

I need some moral support. But the 'm' is silent.

Love, a Face in the Crowd

Dear Face in the Crowd,

I am afraid my studies haven't focused much around oral health, but I can ask @ask-nurse-blainey if she has any recommendations for a mediwizard who may specialise in such care.

Yours faithfully, Alsius

Patricia Neal and Andy Griffith in A Face in the Crowd, 1957.

In short: Phantom Liberty is a great, fun and intense DLC that unlocks the worst ending in the game.

A Face In The Crowd

A Face in the Crowd (1957)/Margaret Atwood/Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Film Meme - (7/9) Male Characters-Lonesome Rhodes

“Those morons out there? Shucks, I could take chicken fertilizer and sell it to them as caviar. I could make them eat dog food and think it was steak. Sure, I got 'em like this… You know what the public's like? A cage of guinea pigs. Good night, you stupid idiots. Good night, you miserable slobs. They're a lot of trained seals. I toss them a dead fish and they'll flap their flippers.”

ANDY GRIFFITH as LARRY “LONESOME” RHODES in A FACE IN THE CROWD (1957)

A very happy birthday in the afterlife to Walter Matthau!

Recommendations 1-5:

1. HARLAN COUNTY, USA (1976), dir. Barbara Kopple

“WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

This film documents the coal miners’ strike against the Brookside Mine of the Eastover Mining Company in Harlan County, Kentucky in June, 1973. Eastovers refusal to sign a contract (when the miners joined with the United Mine Workers of America) led to the strike, which lasted more than a year and included violent battles between gun-toting company thugs/scabs and the picketing miners and their supportive women-folk. Director Barbara Kopple puts the strike into perspective by giving us some background on the historical plight of the miners and some history of the UMWA.”

Availability: Free on YouTube, Archive . org, (possibly Kanopy), and also available on the subscription services HBO Max and The Criterion Channel

2. 1776 (1972), dir. Peter H. Hunt

“THE AWARD WINNING MUSICAL COMES TO THE SCREEN!

The film focuses on the representatives of the Thirteen original colonies who participated in the Second Continental Congress. 1776 depicts the three months of deliberation (and, oftentimes, acrimonious debate) that led up to the signing of one of the most important documents in the History of the United States, the Declaration of Independence.”

Availability: available for rental on Vudu, YouTube, and Amazon

3. DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST (1991), dir. Julie Dash

“Languid look at the Gullah culture of the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia where African folk-ways were maintained well into the 20th Century and was one of the last bastion of these mores in America.”

Availability: TubiTV and possibly Kanopy. Also available for rental on YouTube, AppleTV, GooglePlay, KinoNow and through a subscription service via Amazon.

4. ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN (1976), dir. Alan J. Pakula

“THE MOST DEVASTATING DETECTIVE STORY OF THIS CENTURY.

In the run-up to the 1972 elections, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward covers what seems to be a minor break-in at the Democratic Party National Headquarters. He is surprised to find top lawyers already on the defense case, and the discovery of names and addresses of Republican fund organizers on the accused further arouses his suspicions. After the editor of the Post runs with the story and assigns Woodward and Carl Bernstein to it, they find the trail leading higher and higher in the Republican Party—and eventually into the White House itself.”

Availability: Streaming on HBO Max and available for rental via YouTube

5. A FACE IN THE CROWD (1957), dir. Elia Kazan

“POWER! HE LOVED IT! HE TOOK IT RAW IN BIG GULPFULS … HE LIKED THE TASTE, THE WAY IT MIXED WITH THE BOURBON AND THE SIN IN HIS BLOOD!

The rise of a raucous hayseed named Lonesome Rhodes from itinerant Ozark guitar picker to local media rabble-rouser to TV superstar and political king-maker. Marcia Jeffries is the innocent Sarah Lawrence girl who discovers the great man in a back-country jail and is the first to fall under his spell.”

Availability: available for rental via YouTube, AppleTV, GooglePlay, and Vudu

[The American Experience Film Recs]

Andy Griffith in A Face in the Crowd (Elia Kazan, 1957) Cast: Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, Anthony Franciosa, Walter Matthau, Lee Remick, Percy Waram, Paul McGrath, Marshall Neilan. Screenplay: Budd Schulberg. Cinematography: Gayne Rescher, Harry Stradling Sr. Art direction: Paul Sylbert, Richad Sylbert. Film editing: Gene Milford. Music: Tom Glazer. A Face in the Crowd's Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes is a product of the media's amoral pursuit of the colorful character, a man lifted to uncommon power by those entertained by the flamboyance and vulgarity. Rhodes isn't so much the villain of Budd Schulberg's story and screenplay as are his enablers, Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal) and Mel Miller (Walter Matthau), and his exploiters, like Joey DePalma (Anthony Franciosa), who enrich themselves while discovering the previously untapped potential of mass media. In 1957, this potential was just beginning to be realized, but 60 years later it took a dangerous man to the White House. I don't think Kazan and Schulberg fully realized that possibility, just as Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky didn't fully realize the prescience of Network (Lumet, 1976). Both films should serve as a permanent warning that today's satire is tomorrow's nightmare. A Face in the Crowd is an important film without being a great one. Schulberg's screenplay falls apart in the middle, and the denouement in which Marcia somehow comes to her senses and exposes Rhodes as a fraud is awkward and mechanical, largely because Marcia herself is something of a mechanical character. An actress of considerable skill, Neal does what she can to make the character live, but the words aren't there in the script to explain why she tolerates Rhodes's fraudulence as long as she does. Matthau and Franciosa come off a little better because their roles are written as stereotypes: Cynical Writer and Go-getting Hot Shot. So the film really belongs to Andy Griffith, who parlays his dead-eyed shark's grin into something that should have been the foundation of a career with more highlights than a folksy sitcom and an old-fart detective show. It's a charismatic but ragged performance that needed a little more shaping from writer and director, something that Kazan admitted to himself in his diaries when he wrote about Rhodes and the film, "The complexity ... was left out." Rather than having Rhodes revealed as a fraud to his followers, Kazan said, Rhodes should have been allowed to recognize that he had been trapped by his own fraudulence. Deprived of anagnorisis, a moment of tragic self-recognition, Rhodes becomes a figure of melodrama, bellowing "Marcia!" from the balcony at the end but probably fated to make what Miller suggests to him, the comeback of a has-been. Fortunately, Kazan and Schulberg were wise enough to change their original ending, in which Rhodes commits suicide -- there's not enough tragedy in their conception of the character for that.