“Well, uh, I may be old fashioned, but I do think there’s a difference between politics and, uh, your field.”

The person who says this in A Face In The Crowd is a senator who’s not doing too hot on television and has come to media personality and demagogue Lonesome Rhodes, played by Andy Griffith, for help. The film is in essence about how the senator is wrong – the political realm and the media/entertainment realm have merged permanently together in the wake of television and sixty years later its thesis is remarkably relevant. Elia Kazan’s film is deeply, hauntingly cynical, its script focusing on characters who are all at some level or another morally compromised or downright craven. But that sad, black-hearted view has aged all too well now as the American government seemingly becomes a new source of entertainment and the president of CBS is quoted as saying that “Trump is good for CBS.” But then A Face In The Crowd is radical enough to say that maybe this has always been the case, that we were just fooling ourselves that American democracy could never be perverted by the ever present leer of the television camera and its star.

Griffith plays Rhodes, an Arkansas drifter and drunkard who is discovered in the county jail by Marcia Jeffries, a radio producer. Intrigued by his charisma and loud, folksy charm, she offers him a job singing on her radio show and his popularity grows and grows. Coined Lonesome Rhodes by Marcia, Rhodes moves from radio to television and then to politics, his brash lifeforce pushing him ever upward, but it becomes clear that Rhodes can be manipulated and will use the masses himself to push whatever right wing agenda the powers that be deem fit. It’s a cliché in criticism but (and I think Kazan seemed to understand this based on the strong shadows and dynamic lighting) A Face In The Crowd is a horror film: the rise and fall of a monster.

I have a theory that Stephen King at some point saw the movie and based Randall Flagg on Rhodes. Rhodes is a “dark man” with an acoustic guitar: appealing, rugged, confident, unstable, and a little mad. Griffiths is simply stunning, the homespun low key nature of Andy Taylor twisted into something huge and devlish. He dominates the screen, his laughter too loud and long, cackling like he’s about to curdle into contempt. Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg make Rhodes both fake and authentic at the same time as if he predicts the contemporary triumph of the rock star (the reveal that the town Rhodes always speaks of on the radio is a fake is perfect, because of course). Yet Rhodes never loses a certain vulnerability, especially around Marcia, the only person who really knows him at all (and is eventually terrified by him). Rhodes is very good at playing people but he doesn’t understand that gift at first and Griffiths plays off a moment when he realizes a mass audience will do whatever he says as one of a terrible, sharp clarity.

A Face In The Crowd is made up of many moments like that, of characters seeing either that something is wrong here or understanding how they can use Rhodes to their advantage. The real arc of the film isn’t really Rhode’s rise to power, it’s Marcia’s turn from confidant and lover to his destroyer as she realizes what Rhodes is capable of and how he starts to see people as sheep. And O’Neal is very good in particular in her silent reactions to Lonesome in the last half, her expression moving slowly into guilty agony. Her naturalism bounces neatly off of Griffith’s absurd, outsized performance; the whole film revolves around quieter, subtler actors like Walter Matthau in dynamic contrast to a force of nature.

What makes the film work as a whole is these tensions and different styles working against each other. The black and white expressionist photography uses striking, natural shadows, as if we are immersed in moral ambiguity from the very beginning. We’re never quite comfortable in the atmosphere of the film – Kazan uses Expressionist style to set us on edge a little. Night of the Hunter made two years earlier similarly places the audience in a country setting where the Expressionist influence is palpable and sets an eerie pall over this alien land. Even the score here interpolating “You Gotta Move” sounds wrong somehow..

The filmmaking changes rapidly in and of itself.as if reacting to its contradictions. The Vitajex commercial/montage that uses Rhodes’ jingle feels at least ten years ahead of its time, a Richard Lester hodge-podge of quick cuts and capitalist imagery gone haywire, the editing rapid and disorienting (and most importantly funny). Kazan was known best as a filmmaker of torment and glorious angst but he shows dizzying variety and skill in A Face In The Crowd, as if he was reading where the next decade was going and wanted to get there first.

And of course the film overall predicted the next sixty years – its influence was seen in everything from Putney Swope to Anchorman. I wonder if the movie was produced in 2017 whether the ending would be as punishing to Rhodes without the Hays Code to worry about – in real life there was seemingly no one that was able to stop the rise of Trump to the presidency, and the media both despises him and knows they get an enormous boost from their headlines about the campaign and eventually the administration. Like Rhodes mocking the sponsors, Trump’s subversion is shallow if accurate (Trump saying he could buy any candidate was absolutely true) – they’re both masters of improv and they wrap right wing propaganda in “no bullshit” anti-elitism. The major difference is perhaps that the wealthy men who tell Rhodes that they feel the elites must guide the masses, presumably to the right, no longer hold as much sway in real life. Now it’s as if a version of Rhodes himself, a media man to the last, holds the real power, and why wouldn’t that be the case? If our political future is determined by the image, by the power of the camera, then why wouldn’t the Star themselves become the true power? In the final shot Rhodes is left despairing and alone but the Coca-Cola sign flashes on and off like a beacon. The spectacle is never defeated. It’ll just find someone else.