Journal Article

A Face in the Crowd in the Trump era

Neve, Brian

2020

Overview

Both men were cooperative witnesses at the early 1950s hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and it was the huge success of their On the Waterfront (1954) that facilitated Kazan’s move to independent production, and the discussion of a new project drawing on their recollections of Huey Long in the 1930s, of radio figures Will Rogers and Arthur Godfrey, and of the role of television in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s rise and fall. In his notes for the project, Kazan insists that De Palma, Rhodes’s self-appointed New York agent and later President of Lonesome Rhodes Enterprises, “is NOT A HEAVY!!”[7] His “dance” with Rhodes, two alpha males excited by future opportunities, works both as satire and psychologically. A recent New York Times story recorded the president as making a desperate appeal for “Suburban women, will you please like me?”[9] President Barack Obama noted last week (on the stump for Joe Biden): “This is not a reality show. Nora Sayre, “A 1957 Film Speaks of Watergate”, New York Times, 8 September 1974; “A Face in the Crowd”, Blu-Ray Edition, The Criterion Collection, 2019.

• Publisher: Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan Library),Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library
• Subject: American literature / Archives & records / Blacklisting / Blu-ray discs / Film history / Griffith, Andy / Kazan, Elia / Motion picture directors & producers / Motion pictures / Politics / Populism / Presidents / Radio / Schulberg, Budd / Television / Trump, Donald J