Elia Kazan never stopped making great pictures, but much of his output after 1952 was politically defensive in nature. This powerful indictment of American media madness is a genuine classic, but it also points up the need for ‘good folk’ to sometimes betray their associates. The target this time around is the most kill-worthy monster in the history of sardonic satire: Lonesome Rhodes, a faux-populist master manipulator of the pushover public. Kazan and Budd Schulberg’s premise has come to pass in real life, but their silver bullet of truth has lost its power: even when unmasked publicly, some media monsters thrive.
A Face in the Crowd
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 970
1957 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 125 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date April 23, 2019 / 39.95
Starring: Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, Anthony Franciosa, Walter Matthau, Lee Remick.
Cinematography: Gayne Rescher, Harry Stradling
Art Direction: Paul Sylbert, Richard Sylbert
Film Editor: Gene Milford
Original...
A Face in the Crowd
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 970
1957 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 125 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date April 23, 2019 / 39.95
Starring: Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, Anthony Franciosa, Walter Matthau, Lee Remick.
Cinematography: Gayne Rescher, Harry Stradling
Art Direction: Paul Sylbert, Richard Sylbert
Film Editor: Gene Milford
Original...
- 4/16/2019
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Swampland race relations in 'Chloe, Love Is Calling You': Desired by two handsome white men, is Olive Borden black or white? Swampland race relations: Bizarre 'Chloe Love Is Calling You' mixes reactionary ideas & voodoo Whenever I watch a film such as the swampland-set 1934 thriller Chloe, Love Is Calling You (a.k.a. Chloe), I like to think about the reactions of the theater audience when it was first shown. Since Marshall Neilan's movie covers subjects such as race, miscegenation, voodoo, murder, and mayhem, I can imagine some volatile reactions. But then again, this little-known thriller of the occult genre has been rarely seen, even in the post-home video days. The first thing about it that got my attention was the listing of Neilan as Director and Olive Borden as Star. During the silent era, Neilan's name had been long associated with Mary Pickford's most famous vehicles, among them...
- 1/20/2017
- by Danny Fortune
- Alt Film Guide
Patricia Neal ca. 1950. Patricia Neal movies: 'The Day the Earth Stood Still,' 'A Face in the Crowd' Back in 1949, few would have predicted that Gary Cooper's leading lady in King Vidor's The Fountainhead would go on to win a Best Actress Academy Award 15 years later. Patricia Neal was one of those performers – e.g., Jean Arthur, Anne Bancroft – whose film career didn't start out all that well, but who, by way of Broadway, managed to both revive and magnify their Hollywood stardom. As part of its “Summer Under the Stars” series, Turner Classic Movies is dedicating Sunday, Aug. 16, '15, to Patricia Neal. This evening, TCM is showing three of her best-known films, in addition to one TCM premiere and an unusual latter-day entry. 'The Day the Earth Stood Still' Robert Wise was hardly a genre director. A former editor (Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons...
- 8/16/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Everybody's favorite movie decade: Which ones are the best movies released in the 20th century's second decade? Best Film (Pictured above) Broken Blossoms: Barthelmess and Gish star as ill-fated lovers in D.W. Griffith’s romantic melodrama featuring interethnic love. Check These Out (Pictured below) Cabiria: is considered one of the major landmarks in motion picture history, having inspired the scope and visual grandeur of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance. Also of note, Pastrone's epic of ancient Rome introduced Maciste, a bulky hero who would be featured in countless movies in the ensuing decades. Best Actor (Pictured below) In the tragic The Italian, George Beban plays an Italian immigrant recently arrived in the United States (Click below for film review). Unfortunately, his American dream quickly becomes a horrendous nightmare of poverty and despair. Best Actress (Pictured below) The movies' super-vamp Theda Bara in A Fool There Was: A little...
- 3/27/2013
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
A Face In The Crowd (1957) Director: Elia Kazan Cast: Patricia Neal, Andy Griffith, Anthony Franciosa, Walter Matthau, Lee Remick, Percy Waram, Paul McGrath, Marshall Neilan, Alexander Kirkland, Kay Medford Screenplay: Budd Schulberg; from his short story "Your Arkansas Traveler" Patricia Neal, Andy Griffith, A Face in the Crowd Elia Kazan’s 1957 drama A Face in the Crowd, written by Kazan's On the Waterfront collaborator Budd Schulberg, is neither the forgotten masterpiece its champions claim it to be nor a minor work to be disregarded as it was for several decades. In fact, A Face in the Crowd is a good though clearly flawed effort, whose chief weaknesses are a screenplay that gets bogged down in soap-operatic didacticism and Andy Griffith's over-the-top film debut as Larry ‘Lonesome’ Rhodes, a Will Rogers-like homespun philosopher who rises from drunken jailbird to national kingmaker. On the positive side, A Face in the Crowd...
- 1/25/2012
- by Dan Schneider
- Alt Film Guide
Frederica Sagor Pt.2: Women Screenwriters in 1920s Hollywood [Photo: Emil Jannings in The Way of All Flesh.] Frederica Sagor's reported final Hollywood screen credit was the scenario for the 1928 slapstick comedy The Farmer's Daughter, directed by Arthur Rosson at Fox. Marjorie Beebe, previously featured in several comedy shorts, had the title role (no relation to Loretta Young's 1947 Oscar-winning Congresswoman-to-be). In her book, Sagor says she was paid $750 a week (approx. $9,700 today) to write the story for this programmer — one she hated — about rural lovers and piles of manure. The previous year, Sagor had married screenwriter Ernest Maas, who held an executive post at Fox. In her autobiography, she states that the couple wrote a story named Beefsteak Joe, inspired by the life of Maas' father, that was misappropriated by Paramount and released as The Way of All Flesh. Directed by Gone with the Wind's Victor Fleming, the now-lost melodrama — Madame X meets Stella Dallas in...
- 1/7/2012
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Claudette Colbert, Alla Nazimova, Marion Davies, Charles Boyer: Cinecon 2011 Thursday September 1 (photo: Alla Nazimova) 7:00 Hollywood Rhythm (1934) 7:10 Welcoming Remarks 7:15 Hollywood Story (1951) 77 min. Richard Conte, Julie Adams, Richard Egan. Dir: William Castle. 8:35 Q & A with Julie Adams 9:10 Blazing Days (1927) 60 min. Fred Humes. Dir: William Wyler. 10:20 In The Sweet Pie And Pie (1941) 18 min 10:40 She Had To Eat (1937) 75 min. Jack Haley, Rochelle Hudson, Eugene Pallette. Friday September 2 9:00 Signing Off (1936) 9:20 Moon Over Her Shoulder (1941) 68 min. Dan Dailey, Lynn Bari, John Sutton, Alan Mowbray. 10:40 The Active Life Of Dolly Of The Dailies (1914) 15 min. Mary Fuller. 10:55 Stronger Than Death (1920) 80 min. Alla Nazimova, Charles Bryant. Dir: Herbert Blaché, Charles Bryant, Robert Z. Leonard. 12:15 Lunch Break 1:45 Open Track (1916) 2:00 On The Night Stage (1915) 60 min. William S. Hart, Rhea Mitchell. Dir: Reginald Barker. 3:15 50 Miles From Broadway (1929) 23 min 3:45 Cinerama Adventure (2002). Dir: David Strohmaier. 5:18 Discussion...
- 9/2/2011
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Mary Pickford was the screen’s first legend in her own lifetime; throughout the 1910’s and ‘20s, the most popular and beloved star and woman on earth, “America’s Sweetheart” and, overseas, “The World’s Sweetheart.” Also, I believe, she was greatly responsible for getting women the vote in 1920 (in the U.S.; 1918 in Ireland; 1919 England): How could Mary Pickford (or Lillian Gish, for that matter, or Gloria Swanson) not have the right to vote? “Little Mary’s” favorite—-and best—-director was the star silent filmmaker-actor Marshall Neilan, who has haunted me for years. Howard Hawks, no less, first mentioned him to me…...
- 5/11/2011
- Blogdanovich
Theodore Roberts, Mary Pickford in Marshall Neilan's M'Liss; smaller photo: Joseph Yranski Mary Pickford was the definition of Movie Superstar from the early 1910s to the late 1920s. So popular and so powerful was Pickford that she, along with Douglas Fairbanks, Charles Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith, founded United Artists so as to have fuller artistic and financial control over her cinematic endeavors. Several years later, Pickford would be one of the co-founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Probably not coincidentally, she was the second Best Actress Academy Award winner, for her performance in the talkie Coquette. Those in the Los Angeles area unfamiliar with Pickford's work will be able to check her out at The Mary Pickford Institute for Film Education, which will be screening the 1918 comedy M'Liss on Tuesday, May 10, at 7:30 p.m. Free admission, though donations are accepted to support the Institute.
- 5/9/2011
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
M’Liss (1918) Direction: Marshall Neilan Screenplay: Frances Marion; from Bret Harte’s story Cast: Mary Pickford, Thomas Meighan, Theodore Roberts, Tully Marshall, Charles Ogle, Monte Blue, Winifred Greenwood Mary Pickford, Thomas Meighan in M’Liss Directed by Marshall Neilan and written by Frances Marion – two frequent Mary Pickford collaborators — M’Liss is one of Pickford’s very best films. In this comedy-drama, Pickford plays a spirited and unruly mountain girl, that’s the M’Liss of the title, who falls in love with the new schoolteacher (Thomas Meighan) — who is later falsely accused of murder. Pickford, by then already a superstar, gives a sterling performance; she is ably supported by (future star) Thomas Meighan as the schoolteacher, as well as a fine collection of character actors including [...]...
- 11/2/2009
- by James Bazen
- Alt Film Guide
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