Two American pictures arrived within weeks of each other in the summer of 1957, and between them they took the measure of a country that was learning to manufacture reputation at industrial scale. One looked at the print column, the syndicated paragraph that could lift an unknown into the spotlight or bury a career under a single insinuating line. The other looked at the broadcast, the radio voice and then the television face that could turn a drifter into a force capable of bending an election. Neither film knew it was making the other’s argument from the opposite end. Watched together now, Sweet Smell of Success and A Face in the Crowd read like a single diagnosis delivered in two registers, and the question they raise has only sharpened with every decade since: when a society lets a machine decide who is famous and who is finished, who actually holds the controls, and what does that machine do to the people it lifts and the people who watch?

That is the question this comparison sets out to answer, and it is worth stating plainly that the two films do not split the work evenly. They diagnose the same disease from different organs. Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success studies the gossip column as a closed circuit of favor and fear, a Manhattan ecosystem where a press agent feeds the columnist and the columnist feeds the public, and the currency that flows through all of it is the manufactured paragraph. Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd studies the broadcast as an open valve, a stream that pours a single voice into millions of living rooms until the voice begins to believe it owns the country. Put the two side by side and you can watch the same engine, reputation built and weaponized for profit, running on two different fuels. The deciding question, the one this piece argues toward, is which film saw further down the road we were actually traveling.

Why These Two Films Belong on the Same Bill

Pairing films from the same year is easy and usually arbitrary. Pairing these two is neither, because they share more than a release calendar. They share a subject, a moral temperature, and a historical hinge that ties them together so neatly it almost feels designed. The hinge is a man named Walter Winchell.

Winchell was the most powerful newspaper and radio commentator in mid-century America, a syndicated columnist whose verdicts could make a Broadway show or break a public figure, and whose rapid, telegraphic delivery on the air reached audiences in the tens of millions. He is the acknowledged model for Burt Lancaster’s J.J. Hunsecker, the columnist at the dark center of Sweet Smell of Success, a man whose printed sentence is treated by everyone around him as a kind of weather, something to be survived rather than argued with. And Winchell appears, as himself, in a cameo inside A Face in the Crowd, one of several real broadcasters Kazan recruited to lend his fable the texture of fact. So the same historical figure sits at the root of both films at once, fictionalized into a villain in one and physically present in the other, which means the two pictures are not merely about the same theme. They are about the same world, the same apparatus of manufactured fame, caught at the precise moment it was migrating from the printed page to the cathode tube.

The migration is the deeper reason to watch them together. Sweet Smell of Success is the older medium at its most concentrated and most poisonous, the column as a sealed room where a handful of insiders trade in destruction. A Face in the Crowd is the newer medium at its most expansive and most frightening, the broadcast as a flood that reaches everyone and answers to no one. Read in sequence, they trace the arc of mass persuasion crossing from the few to the many, from the smoke of the nightclub to the glow of the screen, and they show that the rot did not change when the medium changed. It only scaled.

There is a craft kinship too. Both films are written with a verbal density that was rare in 1957 and is rarer now. Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman wrote Sweet Smell of Success in a stylized, knife-edged New York patter that turns ordinary cruelty into a kind of music. Budd Schulberg wrote A Face in the Crowd in a looser, folksier, but no less calculated American vernacular, the down-home idiom that Lonesome Rhodes weaponizes against the very audience that trusts it. Both screenplays understand that media power is finally a matter of language, of who gets to choose the words a mass audience hears, and both films treat that choice as the real seat of control. The column and the broadcast are delivery systems. Language is the payload.

So the case for the double bill is not thematic coincidence. It is a shared anatomy. Two films, one year, one apparatus of manufactured reputation, studied from the print end and the broadcast end by writers who understood that the danger lived in the sentence. What follows takes each film apart on its own terms, then sets them against each other and against the way cinema elsewhere in the world was circling the same fear, and arrives at a verdict on which diagnosis cut closer to the bone.

The Column as Engine: Inside Sweet Smell of Success

Sweet Smell of Success opens on a city that never sleeps and never forgives. The presses roll, the bundles of newspapers hit the Manhattan pavement, and inside one of those papers is the column that the whole film orbits, the daily verdict of J.J. Hunsecker. The picture wastes no time establishing the food chain. At the bottom is Sidney Falco, a press agent played by Tony Curtis with a desperation so total it reads as a kind of acrobatics, a man who can flatter, lie, threaten, and grovel in a single sentence and mean all of it. At the top is Hunsecker, who barely moves, because he does not have to. Power that has to chase you is weak. Power that makes you chase it is the real thing, and Lancaster plays Hunsecker as a man who has not chased anything in years.

The plot is almost cruelly simple, which is part of its force. Hunsecker wants his younger sister Susan separated from the jazz guitarist she loves, Steve Dallas. He cannot do it himself without exposing the unwholesome possessiveness at the heart of his interest in her, so he leans on Falco, who needs Hunsecker’s column to mention his clients or he starves. Falco’s assignment is to destroy Dallas by any means, and the means he settles on, planting a smear that paints the clean-living musician as a marijuana smoker and a radical, is a miniature of the entire apparatus the film is dissecting. A lie is placed into print. The printed lie becomes fact because it appeared in print. The fact ruins a man. Nobody had to be right. Somebody only had to be published.

What lifts this above a simple morality play is the writing, and the writing is the film’s most celebrated quality for good reason. Odets, a playwright of the social-drama tradition, and Lehman, who had lived inside the publicity world and based the story on his own novelette, built a dialogue style that is stylized to the edge of unreality and yet feels truer than naturalism. Hunsecker greets a senator’s crooked errand with a line that turns courtesy into a threat. He looks at Falco and tells him, in effect, that he would hate to take a bite out of him because he is a cookie full of arsenic, a phrase that has outlived almost everything else about the period because it compresses the film’s whole view of its characters into eight words: these are people who would poison you, and the only reason they have not is that they have not gotten hungry enough yet. The patter is fast, alliterative, and merciless, and it never stops advancing the power relationships in the room. Every exchange is a transaction. Every compliment is collateral.

James Wong Howe’s cinematography is the second pillar, and it is impossible to separate the film’s meaning from its look. Howe shot Manhattan at night on location and on sets dressed to feel like location, in a high-contrast black and white where the neon signs blow out into glare and the doorways drop into pure shadow. The city is beautiful and it is a trap. Light in this film is not warmth, it is exposure, the thing a press agent both craves and fears, because to be seen by Hunsecker’s column is to be at his mercy. Howe underlit interiors so that faces emerge and submerge as people move, and the effect is that nobody is ever fully visible, which is exactly right for a story about people who survive by controlling what others are allowed to see. The famous restaurant and nightclub sequences, with their crowded frames and their hard pools of light, turn the social world into a kind of arena where reputation is the only blood sport in season.

Hunsecker’s particular menace is that he wields a public instrument for private ends, and the film never lets you forget the asymmetry. He sits at a nightclub table and conducts the destruction of a man’s life as a favor to his own buried obsession, and he does it with the full machinery of a syndicated column behind him, a machine built ostensibly to inform the public and actually to serve the man who runs it. That is the engine the film is naming. The column presents itself as a window onto the city and operates as a lever the columnist alone can pull. The public reads it as news. Hunsecker uses it as a private army. The gap between what the medium claims to be and what it actually does is the whole tragedy, and Falco lives in that gap, ferrying lies upward and favors downward, until the gap closes on him.

The ending refuses the comfort of a clean punishment. When Hunsecker’s scheme is finally exposed within the closed world of his own circle, the resolution is not justice in any satisfying sense. Falco is beaten and broken, Susan escapes her brother’s grip, and Hunsecker is wounded but not destroyed, because a man who is the medium cannot be ruined by a single bad night the way the people who depend on the medium can. The column will print again tomorrow. The engine does not switch off because one of its operators got burned. That refusal to grant catharsis is the most prophetic thing about the film. It understood that the apparatus outlasts the individual scandal, that the structure is the story, and that punishing one bad actor changes nothing about the machine that made him possible.

How does Sweet Smell of Success turn dialogue into a weapon?

The screenplay by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman treats speech as the medium of power itself. Characters never simply talk; they bargain, threaten, and trade leverage inside compressed, alliterative lines like the famous arsenic insult. Because the column runs on words, the film makes its dialogue the literal substance of control, so every exchange advances who holds power over whom.

The Broadcast as Engine: Inside A Face in the Crowd

If Sweet Smell of Success is a sealed room, A Face in the Crowd is an open sky, and the difference in scale is the difference between the two films’ fears. Kazan’s picture begins in a county jail in Pickett, Arkansas, where a young radio producer named Marcia Jeffries, played by Patricia Neal with a wounded intelligence that carries the entire film, is recording a human-interest segment called A Face in the Crowd. In a drunk tank she finds Larry Rhodes, a wandering guitar player she nicknames Lonesome on the spot, and she puts him on the air. Andy Griffith, in his screen debut, plays Rhodes as a force of nature, all grin and twang and apparent good fellowship, and the audience response is instant and enormous. The folksy authenticity sells. That is the seed of everything the film grows into, because the authenticity is a performance, and the performance scales without limit.

The arc of the picture is the arc of the broadcast era compressed into one career. Rhodes moves from the local radio show to a Memphis television slot to a national network program, and at each step his reach multiplies and his contempt for the audience deepens in exact proportion. The film is precise about the mechanics of how a folksy nobody becomes a national force, and the precision is what makes it a study rather than a fable. When a sponsor, a mattress company, pulls its advertising after Rhodes mocks it on air, his loyal viewers revolt and burn mattresses in the street, and the sponsor discovers that his irreverence actually drove sales up. That is the moment Rhodes learns what he is. He is not an entertainer who sells products. He is a persuasion machine, and the product is incidental. The film follows that logic to its end. Soon he is repackaging a stiff energy pill called Vitajex as a yellow tablet sold on the promise of sexual vigor, and the campaign works, because Rhodes has understood that the broadcast does not transmit information, it transmits feeling, and feeling moves more pills than facts ever could.

The political turn is where the film’s nerve shows. Rhodes is recruited to coach a wooden conservative presidential hopeful, Senator Worthington Fuller, in the art of seeming like a regular man, rebranding the stiff candidate with a folksy nickname and a homespun manner. Behind the scenes, a power broker explains the philosophy out loud: the masses must be guided by a responsible elite, and television is the most powerful instrument of mass persuasion ever invented. The film does not soften this. It puts the thesis in the mouth of a cynic and lets the cynic be right about the tool even as he is monstrous about the goal. Rhodes is being groomed not to inform the electorate but to manufacture a feeling about a candidate, the same trick he used to sell pills, applied to the choice of who will lead the country. The broadcast that began as a human-interest segment about ordinary faces ends as an engine for installing a leader, and the only thing that changed along the way was the size of the audience.

Kazan, working from Budd Schulberg’s screenplay, films all of this with a documentary restlessness, handheld where it serves the energy and crowded with the apparatus of broadcasting, cameras, monitors, control booths, and the applause machine that supplies manufactured cheering on cue. That applause machine is the film’s sharpest single image of the medium it is dissecting. The cheering the home audience hears is not real enthusiasm; it is a device operated by a technician, a fabricated response that the viewer experiences as genuine. The broadcast manufactures not only the star but the crowd’s reaction to the star, and the viewer at home, hearing the applause, joins a consensus that was assembled in a booth. Long before anyone used the phrase, the film had diagnosed the engineered audience, the sense of belonging to a mass approval that was in fact constructed for you to join.

The destruction of Rhodes is one of the great endings in American film precisely because it locates his vulnerability in the medium itself. Marcia, who discovered him and made him and has watched in growing horror as the warm public man becomes a private monster who despises the people who adore him, finally turns the machine against its master. As his program closes, she leaves a microphone live over the end credits, and the home audience hears Rhodes off guard, mocking his viewers as idiots and sneering at the senator he is supposed to be selling. The contempt that was always there, hidden behind the grin, pours into millions of living rooms in his own voice. His career collapses in the time it takes an elevator to descend. The man who lived by the broadcast dies by it, screaming into an empty penthouse for the audience that has already abandoned him. The medium that built him needed only to show him plainly for one unguarded minute, and the spell broke.

How did A Face in the Crowd predict television demagoguery so precisely?

The film traced the full mechanism: a folksy authenticity that scales through the airwaves, an applause machine that manufactures consent, a sponsor who learns persuasion outsells information, and finally a politician rebranded as an everyman. Kazan and Schulberg mapped how broadcast charisma converts into political power, anticipating a media-and-politics fusion that later decades would realize in full.

The Genuine Points of Difference That Matter

A useful comparison resists the urge to flatten two works into one point. These films rhyme, but they are not the same film twice, and the places where they diverge are where the comparison earns its keep. Four differences carry real analytical weight: the medium each fears, the scale each imagines, the moral tone each adopts, and the kind of victim each puts at its center.

The first difference is the medium. Sweet Smell of Success fears the print column, an instrument that is narrow, elite, and personal. Hunsecker’s reach is enormous in raw numbers, but the film keeps it intimate, a matter of one man’s pen and the small circle of insiders who fear it. The damage is surgical. A single planted item ruins a single career. A Face in the Crowd fears the broadcast, an instrument that is wide, popular, and impersonal. Rhodes does not target individuals; he shapes the moods of millions at once. The damage is climatic rather than surgical, a change in the emotional weather of an entire country. One film studies a sniper. The other studies a flood.

The second difference is scale, and it follows from the first. Hunsecker’s column can end you, but it cannot elect a president, because print in this conception remains a tool of the cultural in-crowd, powerful within its sphere and bounded by it. Rhodes’s broadcast can do what the column cannot: it can reach past the cultural elite directly into the homes of ordinary citizens and convert their affection into votes. Sweet Smell of Success is finally a chamber tragedy about a poisoned little world. A Face in the Crowd is a national nightmare about the whole world catching the poison at once. The print film is claustrophobic by design; the broadcast film is agoraphobic, terrified of open spaces full of persuadable people.

The third difference is moral tone, and here the two films feel almost like opposites. Sweet Smell of Success is cold all the way through. Nobody in it is innocent, with the partial exception of the two young lovers, and even they are mostly pawns. The film offers no warmth to cling to, only varying grades of corruption, and its bleakness is total and deliberate. A Face in the Crowd runs hotter. It has a genuine conscience in Marcia, a woman who participates in the manufacture of the monster and then chooses, at real cost to herself, to bring him down. The print film says the system is rotten and there is no way out. The broadcast film says the system is rotten but a human being can still choose to sabotage it, even knowing the cost. One is a closed door. The other leaves a window cracked, though what comes through it is more guilt than hope.

The fourth difference is the victim each centers. Sweet Smell of Success puts the operators at its center, Falco and Hunsecker, the people who run the machine, and it watches the machine consume one of its own. The audience, the public that reads the column, is almost absent, a faceless mass that simply believes whatever is printed. A Face in the Crowd inverts this. It puts the audience at its center, the trusting public that adores Rhodes, and it makes their gullibility the real subject. The print film is about the corruption of the few who manufacture reputation. The broadcast film is about the seducibility of the many who consume it. That inversion matters enormously when you ask which film saw further, because the future we got was shaped less by a handful of poisonous insiders than by a vast audience learning to fall in love with the faces a machine selected for it.

Findable Artifact: Two Engines of Media Power

The comparison can be reduced to a single map. The table below sets the columnist’s engine against the broadcaster’s engine across the dimensions that matter: the medium each runs on, how each manufactures influence, whom each preys on, what restrains it, and what it predicts about the future of manufactured fame. This is the analytical spine of the double bill, the framework a reader can carry away and apply to any later case of media-made power.

Dimension	The Columnist (Sweet Smell of Success)	The Broadcaster (A Face in the Crowd)
Medium	Syndicated print column, narrow and elite	Radio then television broadcast, wide and popular
How influence is made	A planted item becomes fact by being printed	A folksy performance becomes trust by being aired
The currency traded	Favor and fear among insiders	Affection and feeling among the masses
Whom it preys on	Rivals, dependents, and the people in its orbit	The trusting home audience and the electorate
Where the contempt sits	Open and acknowledged among the operators	Hidden behind the grin, fatal when exposed
What restrains it	Only the operator’s private interest	Almost nothing, until the medium reveals the man
Scale of damage	Surgical: one career at a time	Climatic: the mood of a nation
What it predicts	The apparatus survives every individual scandal	Charisma plus broadcast equals political power

The framework names the thing both films are circling. Call it the manufactured idol. In each picture, reputation is not earned and discovered but built and deployed, whether by the column that prints a person into importance or by the broadcast that airs a person into love. The idol is a product. The engine that makes the idol can also unmake him, but only on the engine’s own terms, and never in a way that threatens the engine itself. That is the durable insight the pairing delivers, and it travels intact into any era that runs on manufactured fame.

Worldwide Contemporaries: How Cinema Elsewhere Circled the Same Fear

American film in 1957 was not alone in worrying about mass persuasion, and setting these two pictures against the way other national cinemas approached propaganda, celebrity, and the manufactured public clarifies what was distinctively prophetic about the American pair. The fear of the engineered crowd had a long cinematic prehistory, and several strands of world cinema were circling the same anxiety from different directions.

The oldest strand is the propaganda cinema the two films were implicitly answering. The silent montage tradition had already demonstrated that editing could engineer emotion in a mass audience, assembling images so that viewers felt a collective surge of feeling the individual shots did not contain. By the 1930s that knowledge had curdled into the spectacle of the manufactured leader, the rally filmed to make one man look like the embodiment of a people’s will. The American pair of 1957 can be read as the democratic conscience catching up with what propaganda had been doing all along. Where the propaganda film deployed the engineered crowd in service of a leader, Sweet Smell of Success and A Face in the Crowd turned the same understanding into a warning, exposing the manufacture so the audience could see the strings. Kazan’s applause machine is the propaganda rally’s engineered enthusiasm, shown from behind the curtain.

A second strand is the European cinema of celebrity and spectacle that was arriving in the same years. Italian cinema in particular was building toward its own great diagnosis of the celebrity machine, a vision of a society where fame, scandal, and the cameras that feed on both had become the organizing principle of public life, where the photographer chasing a star is as much a part of the apparatus as the star. That Italian strand shares the American films’ conviction that the modern public is something manufactured rather than found, an audience assembled by media to consume the figures media has selected. The difference is one of register. The Italian approach tended toward weary, beautiful melancholy, a sense of spiritual exhaustion under the glare. The American pair is sharper and angrier, less interested in the malaise of celebrity than in the mechanics of how it is built and what it can be made to do. The European film mourns. The American films indict.

A third strand runs through the British and other national satirical traditions of the postwar years, which attacked institutional hypocrisy and the manipulation of the public with a comic edge. The British satirical comedies of the period skewered the way bosses, unions, and press all conspired to manage public opinion, and they did it through farce rather than tragedy. It is worth noting here that Mackendrick himself came from that British comic tradition, having made his name with the Ealing comedies before crossing the Atlantic to direct Sweet Smell of Success, and the move from genial satire to pitiless noir tells you something about how much darker the American subject was. The British tradition laughed at the men who manage the public. The American films could not find the laugh, because the stakes, as they saw them, were the integrity of democratic choice itself.

The comparative claim sharpens against all three strands. The propaganda cinema deployed the engineered crowd; the American pair exposed it. The European celebrity film mourned the spectacle; the American pair diagnosed its machinery. The British satire laughed at the manipulators; the American pair refused the laugh and named the danger. What makes Sweet Smell of Success and A Face in the Crowd distinctive among their worldwide contemporaries is the combination of clinical understanding and moral alarm, the sense that they were not commenting on a culture of manufactured fame from the outside but standing inside the apparatus and pulling the panels off while it ran. American cinema in 1957 diagnosed the media age before it had fully arrived, and the diagnosis was not a lament and not a joke. It was a warning delivered with the engine still running.

Two Performances, Two Theories of the Manufactured Self

Both films live or die on a single central performance, and the contrast between the two leads is itself a lesson in how the print engine and the broadcast engine select for different kinds of people.

Burt Lancaster’s Hunsecker is stillness as menace. Lancaster, an athletic and physically expansive actor by training, plays the columnist as a man who has subtracted motion from his repertoire, who controls a room by refusing to perform for it. The glasses, the flat delivery, the way he lets silence do the threatening, all of it communicates a power that no longer needs to advertise itself. This is the print engine made flesh. The column does not have to be charming; it only has to be feared, and Hunsecker has been feared so long that charm would be a waste of his time. Lancaster understood that the columnist’s power is the power of the man who decides what gets printed, and that such a man performs contempt rather than warmth, because his audience is not the public but the small circle of people who need him.

Tony Curtis’s Falco is the inverse, all motion and no stillness, and the pairing of the two actors dramatizes the food chain perfectly. Curtis plays the press agent as a man who is always selling, always angling, his charm a tool he deploys with such constant force that you can see the exhaustion underneath it. Falco performs warmth because warmth is his only currency, and the tragedy of the character is that he is good at it, good enough that you can glimpse the better man he might have been if the engine had not required him to spend his gifts on flattery and lies. Curtis, who had been dismissed as a pretty face in lightweight pictures, used the role to deepen and darken his persona, and the gamble paid off in one of the era’s most uncomfortable studies of ambition without a floor. The same hunger that drives the great showbiz portraits of the period drives Falco, and the era’s appetite for stories about people who would do anything to win runs straight through this film, the way it runs through the great backstage dramas of the moment, including the acid theatrical world of All About Eve and its cynical view of ambition, where the will to rise is shown to corrode everything it touches.

Andy Griffith’s Lonesome Rhodes is the broadcast engine made flesh, and his performance is the opposite theory of the manufactured self. Where Hunsecker subtracts motion, Rhodes adds it, floods the screen with it, because the broadcast does not reward the man who withholds, it rewards the man who pours himself out. Griffith, then a comic performer with no dramatic reputation, built a characterization of terrifying range, a folksy warmth so convincing that the audience inside the film and the audience watching it both fall for it, and a private contempt so total that the gap between the two becomes the engine of dread. The famous lore around the performance, that Kazan’s coaching drove Griffith so far into the role that he could not fully climb out of it during the shoot, points to the thing the film is about. Rhodes is a performance all the way down, a manufactured authenticity, and playing him required manufacturing it too. The broadcast selects for the man who can perform sincerity at scale, and Griffith showed exactly how seductive and how hollow that performance is.

Patricia Neal’s Marcia is the film’s moral center and its most quietly devastating performance. Neal plays the producer who discovers Rhodes, falls under his spell, builds his career, and then watches it become a monstrosity, with a mixture of hero worship, injured pride, and slowly gathering horror that gives the film its conscience. Her final act, leaving the microphone on, is presented not as triumph but as a kind of self-laceration, the destruction of the thing she made and loved. If Sweet Smell of Success has no one like her, that absence is itself a statement: the print engine, in that film’s vision, has no conscience inside it, only operators. The broadcast film insists that a human being remains inside the machine, capable of sabotage and of guilt. The difference between a film with a Marcia and a film without one is the difference between the two engines’ moral architecture.

Two Screenplays, One Argument About Language

The writing in both films deserves separate attention, because both pictures locate media power in language and both were written by people who understood the apparatus from the inside.

Odets and Lehman built Sweet Smell of Success out of a heightened New York speech that has been studied and imitated ever since. The lines are dense with alliteration, reversal, and threat, a verbal style that sounds like nothing real people say and yet captures something truer than transcription would, the sense that in this world every sentence is a move in a game of leverage. Lehman knew the publicity world firsthand, and the authenticity of the milieu comes through the specificity of the talk, the way the characters speak a private dialect of favors owed and favors called in. Odets brought the moral weight, the sense that this glittering talk is the sound of souls being sold. Together they made a screenplay where the dialogue is not decoration on the theme but the theme itself: the column runs on words, so the film runs on words, and the cruelty of the words is the cruelty of the medium.

Schulberg’s screenplay for A Face in the Crowd works in a different register but toward the same end. Schulberg, who had already written the bruising boxing exposé and would always be drawn to stories of American power and its corruptions, wrote Rhodes in a folksy, anecdotal, down-home idiom, the language of the country yarn and the homespun aside. The genius of the writing is that this warm vernacular is the weapon. Rhodes wins his audience with the very plainness of his speech, the sense that here at last is a man who talks like us, and the film shows that plainness being engineered and aimed. The down-home voice is the broadcast’s version of the column’s poisoned paragraph, a delivery system for manufactured trust. Schulberg understood, as Odets and Lehman did, that whoever controls the words a mass audience hears controls the audience, and he built a screenplay in which the folksy voice is revealed, in the final unguarded minute, to have been contempt in costume all along.

Schulberg’s collaboration with Kazan was not new in 1957. The two had already made one of the decade’s defining films together, a waterfront drama about conscience, testimony, and the cost of speaking up, and the partnership between Kazan and Schulberg on On the Waterfront carried directly into A Face in the Crowd, the same interest in American institutions and the individual crushed or tested by them, now turned from the docks to the airwaves. Where the earlier film asked what it costs to testify against corrupt power, the later one asks what it costs to manufacture power in the first place and then to bring it down. The two films are a diptych about American complicity, and reading them together deepens both.

The Counter-Reading: Are These Just Period Pieces?

The most common dismissal of both films is that they are artifacts of a vanished media world, fascinating as history but bounded by it. The gossip column of Hunsecker’s kind has faded; the three-network broadcast monopoly that made a Lonesome Rhodes possible has shattered into a thousand channels and feeds. On this reading, the films are museum pieces, sharp about their own moment and increasingly distant from ours. The argument deserves a real answer, not a dismissal, because it is not stupid. The specific machinery both films depict has genuinely changed.

The answer is that the films were never finally about the machinery. They were about the logic of manufactured reputation, and that logic has not weakened with the fall of the column and the network; it has metastasized. Hunsecker’s power was the power to decide what gets printed and therefore what becomes fact, and that power did not vanish when print declined. It multiplied and distributed itself, so that the function once held by a handful of feared columnists is now performed by countless smaller engines, each able to print an insinuation into apparent fact and watch it travel. The column did not die. It democratized into something larger and harder to see. The film’s real subject, the moment a placed lie becomes accepted truth because it appeared in a trusted channel, describes the present more exactly than it described 1957, because there are now vastly more channels and the lies travel faster.

A Face in the Crowd survives the period-piece charge even more decisively, because its central insight was never about the technology of three networks but about the convertibility of broadcast charisma into political power. Rhodes is not a creature of any particular delivery system; he is a creature of any system that can carry a performed authenticity directly into the trust of a mass audience and then redirect that trust toward a candidate or a cause. The applause machine that manufactures consent, the sponsor who learns that irreverence sells, the power broker who says plainly that the masses must be guided and the medium is the instrument, the folksy persona engineered for a stiff politician, all of these are mechanisms, not period decorations, and every one of them recurs whenever a new medium learns to carry charisma to a crowd. The film did not predict a specific future. It predicted a recurring structure, and a structure that recurs is the opposite of a period piece.

The deepest reason both films resist the charge is that they understood reputation as a manufactured product rather than a discovered truth, and that understanding is more relevant the more media multiplies, not less. A world with one feared columnist and three networks had a few large engines of manufactured fame. A world with countless channels has countless engines, which means the manufacture of reputation, the very thing both films anatomized, is now the ordinary condition of public life rather than a scandal at its edges. The films feel dated only to a viewer who mistakes their subject for their setting. Their setting is 1957. Their subject is now.

Mackendrick’s Crossing and the Darkening of a Comic Eye

One of the quiet keys to Sweet Smell of Success is the man behind the camera and where he came from. Alexander Mackendrick was a Scottish director who had built his reputation in Britain on a run of sharp, humane comedies before he came to America to make this picture, his first Hollywood film. The comedies were genial on the surface and pointed underneath, studies of small communities and the schemers who try to bend them, and the best of them turned a wry eye on greed and manipulation without ever losing their warmth. His command of that comic-satirical mode is on full display in the Ealing comedy tradition and The Ladykillers, where a gang of crooks meets its match in an unflappable old woman and the joke is on the men who think they can manage the world.

The crossing from that warm satire to the pitiless noir of Sweet Smell of Success is one of the more striking director’s pivots of the decade, and it tells you something about the American subject he found. The same eye that watched English schemers with affection watched the Manhattan publicity world with horror. The comic understanding of how people manipulate one another, sharpened over years of Ealing farce, became, transplanted to New York, a clinical understanding of how a media apparatus manufactures and destroys reputation. There is no warmth in Sweet Smell of Success because Mackendrick could find none in the thing he was filming. The comedy curdled into noir not because the director changed but because the subject did. A man who had spent a career laughing gently at human scheming looked at the American column and stopped laughing.

That biographical arc matters to the comparison because it shows how seriously both films took their subject. Mackendrick did not make a thriller dressed up with a media theme; he made a film in which his entire comic sensibility went dark in contact with the apparatus of manufactured fame. Kazan, from the other direction, brought his theatrical and social-realist intensity, his interest in the individual conscience under institutional pressure, to bear on the broadcast. Two very different filmmakers, one a transplanted comic moralist and one a maker of muscular social drama, arrived in the same year at the same alarm, which is part of why the pairing feels less like coincidence than like a culture working something out through two of its most gifted artists at once.

The Verdict: Which Film Saw Further

A comparison owes a verdict, and the deciding criterion has to be named rather than smuggled in. The criterion here is prophecy, since the brief and the films themselves invite the question of which diagnosis cut closer to the future we actually inhabit. By that measure, the verdict is genuinely close, and the honest answer is that each film was more prophetic about a different half of the present, but if forced to a single decision, A Face in the Crowd saw further, because it understood the audience.

Sweet Smell of Success was the more prophetic film about the supply side of manufactured reputation, the operators and the apparatus. Its insight that the engine survives every individual scandal, that punishing one poisonous insider changes nothing about the structure that produced him, describes the durability of media power with chilling accuracy. Its understanding that a placed lie becomes fact by appearing in a trusted channel describes the present information disorder more exactly than it described its own moment. As an anatomy of how the people who run media power behave, and of how that power outlasts any reckoning, it is close to flawless. What it could not see, because it kept the public faceless and offscreen, was the role the audience would play in the future it was predicting.

A Face in the Crowd saw that role, and seeing it is what gives the film the edge. Its central subject is not the operator but the crowd, the trusting mass that falls in love with a manufactured authenticity and converts that love into power. The film understood that the future of media-made influence would be decided less by a handful of feared insiders than by the seducibility of a vast audience learning to adore the faces a machine selected for it. It understood that broadcast charisma converts directly into political power, that a folksy performance can be engineered and aimed at an election, that the applause we hear can be manufactured and we will join it anyway. Every one of those insights describes the fusion of media, celebrity, and politics that later decades realized in full. The film did not just diagnose the engine; it diagnosed us, the people who keep the engine running by loving its products, and that is the deeper and more uncomfortable prophecy.

So the deciding criterion is reach of prophecy, and the verdict follows from it. Sweet Smell of Success is the more perfect film, tighter, colder, more flawless as a made object, and the more prophetic about the machinery and the operators. A Face in the Crowd is the looser, hotter, more sprawling film, and the more prophetic about the only thing that finally matters in a democracy, the audience and what it can be made to feel and to choose. Because the future we got was shaped above all by what audiences would accept and adore, the broadcast film’s diagnosis proved the deeper one. The column can ruin a man. The broadcast can elect one, and the film that understood the electing audience understood the world that came.

What Each Achieves That the Other Cannot

A verdict is not a dismissal, and each film accomplishes something its partner does not even attempt.

Sweet Smell of Success achieves a formal perfection that A Face in the Crowd never reaches for. It is a sealed, ninety-six-minute machine in which every line, every shadow, every camera move serves the single argument, a film with no slack and no mercy. The collaboration of Odets and Lehman’s dialogue, Howe’s photography, and the two lead performances produces a unity of vision that is rare in any era. As a demonstration of how craft can embody theme, of how a film about the poison of language can be made entirely out of poisonous language and predatory light, it is close to a textbook. The coldness is not a limitation but an achievement, the deliberate refusal of any warmth that might soften the indictment. No film has ever made the gossip column feel more like a loaded weapon, and the picture’s tight, airless mastery is something the broader, baggier broadcast film simply does not pursue.

A Face in the Crowd achieves a scope and a moral complication that the noir’s perfection forecloses. By following one career from a county jail to the brink of national political power, it dramatizes a whole social process rather than a single poisoned circle, and by placing a conscience inside the machine in the figure of Marcia, it asks a harder question than Sweet Smell of Success allows itself: not only how the apparatus corrupts, but what a complicit human being owes once she sees what she has helped build. The film’s looseness is the cost of its ambition, and the ambition is real. It reaches for the relationship between media and democracy itself, for the way a free people can be persuaded to love and then to elect, and it puts the burden of resistance on a flawed individual rather than on the structure. The broadcast film is messier because the subject is messier, and its willingness to be messy in pursuit of a national argument is exactly what the sealed perfection of the print film cannot accommodate.

Put simply, Sweet Smell of Success achieves the perfect closed indictment, and A Face in the Crowd achieves the imperfect open one. The first is the better object. The second is the larger vision. A serious viewer wants both, because between them they say something neither could say alone: that media power corrupts the few who run it and seduces the many who consume it, and that the manufacture of reputation is a single process visible from the operator’s end and the audience’s end at once.

Influence and the Long Afterlife of Both Diagnoses

Neither film was a popular success on release, and the gap between their initial reception and their eventual standing is part of their story. Both underperformed at the box office, both were received as too harsh or too strange for their moment, and both saw their reputations climb steadily across the following decades as the future they described arrived to confirm them. That trajectory, from commercial disappointment to acknowledged landmark, is the natural fate of a prophetic film, which by definition is out of step with the present it is warning about.

The influence of both diagnoses runs through the later cinema of media and power. The broadcast satire that followed, the films and television about the corrupting marriage of the airwaves and ambition, descend in a direct line from A Face in the Crowd, which built the template of the manufactured populist whose charisma outruns any check on it. The fierce satires of the television industry that arrived in the following decades, with their portraits of networks chasing audiences past any moral floor, are the children of Kazan and Schulberg’s diagnosis, extending the same argument into the era when the broadcast had fully replaced the column as the central engine. Sweet Smell of Success cast a longer shadow over the cinema of the predatory operator, the cold studies of people who trade in other people’s reputations, and its dialogue style became a permanent reference point for any writer trying to capture the sound of leverage and contempt. The two films seeded two lineages, the cinema of the seducible crowd and the cinema of the poisonous insider, and both lineages remain fertile because both engines remain in operation.

What unites the afterlife of both films is that the world kept proving them right. Every new medium that learned to carry charisma to a crowd reenacted A Face in the Crowd. Every new channel that learned to print insinuation into fact reenacted Sweet Smell of Success. The films did not age into irrelevance; they aged into documentary. The manufactured idol they named, the reputation built and deployed for profit and power, became more central to public life with each passing decade, until the scandal both films treated as a warning became the ordinary weather of the culture. That is the truest measure of their prophecy. A period piece describes a world that ended. These films described a world that grew.

What Each Film Says About Media Power

Strip away the plots and both films are arguments about where influence comes from in a mediated society, and the arguments are distinct enough to be worth setting out directly.

Sweet Smell of Success argues that media power is the power to define reality for people who cannot check the source. Hunsecker’s column is read as a record of what is true, and the film’s horror is that nobody in the public can tell the difference between what the column reports and what the column invents. The columnist holds the public’s trust and spends it on his private wars, and the public never knows it is being used because it has no way to see behind the printed paragraph. The argument is epistemological at root: the danger of concentrated media power is that it severs the audience from any independent access to the facts, leaving them dependent on a channel that has its own agenda. When the channel lies, the lie becomes the only reality available, and a man can be destroyed not by what he did but by what was printed about him. The film’s bleakness comes from its conviction that there is no remedy inside the system, because the system is the only source of the facts.

A Face in the Crowd argues something adjacent but distinct: that media power is the power to manufacture feeling, and that feeling, not fact, is what moves a mass audience. Rhodes does not lie to his viewers about facts so much as he engineers their emotions, builds a sense of intimacy and trust that has no basis beyond the performance, and then directs that manufactured feeling wherever it profits him, toward a pill, toward a candidate, toward himself. The argument is psychological rather than epistemological: the danger of broadcast power is that it bypasses the audience’s reason entirely and operates directly on their affections, so that they will follow a man they love past every warning sign because the love was installed beneath the level of argument. The film’s terror comes from its conviction that a free people can be made to feel their way into choices that no rational account of their interests would support, and that the medium which can manufacture that feeling holds a power over democracy that votes alone cannot check.

Together the two arguments map the full anatomy of media power. One channel controls the facts; the other channel controls the feelings. One severs the audience from reality; the other floods the audience with manufactured emotion. A society exposed to both, which is to say any modern society, faces a public sphere in which neither the facts nor the feelings of the mass audience are reliably their own, in which both have become products of engines built to manufacture them. That is the combined diagnosis, and it is far more complete than either film delivers alone, which is the final argument for watching them as a pair.

The Demagogue as an American Recurring Figure

A Face in the Crowd belongs to a particular American anxiety, the fear of the homegrown demagogue, the charmer who rises by flattering the common people and ends by despising them. The film is precise about the type, and the precision is what makes Lonesome Rhodes more than a villain. He is a diagnosis of a recurring American figure, and the film maps his rise with the care of a naturalist tracking a species.

The demagogue in this film does not seize power; he is given it, freely and lovingly, by an audience that mistakes his performed authenticity for the real thing. That is the disturbing core of the portrait. Rhodes does not deceive the public against their will; he gives them exactly the figure they want, the plain-spoken man who seems to be one of them, and they hand him their trust because the performance answers a genuine hunger. The film refuses to let the audience off the hook, refuses to pretend the demagogue is simply imposed on an innocent public. He is co-created by the medium that carries him and the crowd that craves him, and the applause machine is the perfect emblem of that co-creation, a device that manufactures the public’s enthusiasm and feeds it back to them until they cannot tell their own feeling from the engineered one.

The political philosophy stated openly inside the film, that the masses must be guided by a responsible elite and that broadcast is the instrument of that guidance, is the demagogue’s enabling cynicism. The power brokers do not believe in Rhodes; they believe in his usefulness, his ability to make the public feel about a candidate the way they feel about a pill. The film thus locates the demagogue inside a system of cynical operators who deploy him, which keeps it from being a simple story of one bad man. Rhodes is a symptom and a tool, manufactured by an apparatus that needed someone like him and would have built another if he had failed. The demagogue, in this account, is not an accident or an aberration but a product the media-political machine generates whenever it needs to convert mass affection into power.

What makes the figure durable is that the film grounds his fall in the same mechanism as his rise. Rhodes is destroyed not by an external reckoning but by the medium revealing him, by a single unguarded minute in which the contempt behind the grin reaches the audience in his own voice. The demagogue who lives by manufactured intimacy dies the moment the manufacture is exposed, because the intimacy was the only thing holding the crowd, and once they see it was always contempt, the spell cannot be rebuilt. That is the film’s one note of hope, faint and hard-won: the same medium that builds the false idol can, if someone inside it chooses to act, show the audience what they have been adoring. The remedy is exposure, and the cost of exposure, as Marcia’s anguish shows, falls hardest on the person willing to pay it.

The Craft of Sound and Image in Two Registers

Both films think with their cameras and their soundtracks, and the contrast in technique mirrors the contrast in subject.

Sweet Smell of Success is a film of hard light and deep shadow, of a city rendered in chrome and ink. Howe’s photography makes Manhattan at night into a landscape of glare and darkness with little in between, and the visual logic is the logic of the column: to be lit is to be exposed, to be in shadow is to be hidden and therefore safe. The frame is often crowded, the characters pressed together in nightclubs and offices, because the world of the column is a world of proximity, of people trapped in the same small ecosystem of favor and fear. The music carries a nervous, propulsive jazz energy, the sound of a city that runs all night on ambition and adrenaline, and the jazz is also literal to the plot, since the young musician at the center of the smear is a guitarist, which ties the film’s sound to its moral stakes. The whole sensory design is centripetal, pulling inward toward the sealed room of the column’s power.

A Face in the Crowd is a film of restless motion and documentary texture, of cameras and monitors and the visible apparatus of broadcasting. Kazan films the rise of Rhodes with a roving, energetic style that matches the expansive, outward-flooding nature of the broadcast, and he fills the frame with the machinery of the medium, the studio cameras, the control booths, the teleprompters, the applause device, so that the viewer is constantly aware of the apparatus manufacturing the image. Where Howe’s photography pulls inward, Kazan’s pulls outward, following the broadcast as it spreads from a county jail to a national audience. The sound design foregrounds the manufactured cheering and the folksy patter, the two engineered noises that carry Rhodes to power, and the film’s most chilling sonic moment is the live microphone at the end, the sound that destroys him, the medium’s own voice turned against its master. The sensory design is centrifugal, spreading outward toward the millions the broadcast reaches.

The contrast is exact and intentional. The print film is sealed, lit like a trap, scored like a sleepless night, crowded into small rooms. The broadcast film is open, restless, full of machinery, spreading outward toward the crowd. Each film’s technique embodies its medium, and watching them in sequence is a lesson in how form can carry meaning, how the same theme of manufactured power produces opposite visual and sonic strategies when the medium under examination changes from the narrow column to the wide broadcast.

What Students, Writers, and Researchers Can Take From the Pairing

For anyone studying film, media, or the history of persuasion, the double bill is unusually rich, and the value lies precisely in reading the two together rather than apart.

For the screenwriter, the pairing is a master class in two opposite dialogue strategies aimed at the same target. Odets and Lehman show how heightened, stylized speech can carry theme directly, how dialogue can be the medium of power rather than a comment on it. Schulberg shows how a folksy, naturalistic vernacular can be even more dangerous, how the appearance of plain authenticity can be the most manufactured thing in the room. A writer who studies both learns that there is no single sound of media power, that it can speak in the knife-edged patter of the insider or the warm drawl of the populist, and that the danger lives in the relationship between the words and the audience’s trust rather than in any particular style.

For the film student, the pairing is a study in how technique embodies subject. The sealed, high-contrast photography of the print film and the restless, apparatus-filled style of the broadcast film are two solutions to the problem of filming media power, and comparing them teaches how cinematography, editing, and sound can carry an argument that the dialogue never has to state. The student also gains a case study in the reception arc of the prophetic film, since both pictures failed commercially and rose in standing as their predictions came true, a pattern worth understanding for anyone trying to read the relationship between a film’s moment and its meaning.

For the researcher in media and politics, the pairing offers a remarkably complete early map of the territory. The two films together anatomize the supply side and the demand side of manufactured reputation, the operators who run the engines and the audiences who consume their products, the manufacture of fact and the manufacture of feeling. A scholar building an argument about the history of media power can use the pair as a primary source on how mid-century American culture understood the apparatus it was building, and as a framework, the engine of manufactured reputation viewed from the column end and the broadcast end, that applies to cases the films never imagined. The comparison is not only a pleasure to watch; it is a tool to think with, which is the highest thing a double bill can be.

The Two Endings, Side by Side

Endings reveal a film’s deepest convictions, and the two finales here diverge in a way that confirms everything the comparison has been building toward.

Sweet Smell of Success ends without catharsis. The scheme is exposed within the closed circle, Falco is beaten and discarded, Susan walks free of her brother, and Hunsecker is wounded but fundamentally intact, because the man who is the medium cannot be undone by a single bad night the way the people who depend on the medium can. The column will run tomorrow. The structure absorbs the scandal and continues. This is the film telling you its bleakest truth, that the apparatus is bigger than any operator and survives every reckoning, that you can hurt a man inside the machine but you cannot stop the machine by hurting him. The refusal of a clean ending is the whole point. There is no exit from the system because the system is the only world the film admits.

A Face in the Crowd ends with a destruction that is also a kind of justice, but a justice purchased at terrible personal cost and shadowed by doubt about whether it will hold. Marcia leaves the microphone live, the audience hears Rhodes’s contempt in his own voice, and his power evaporates in minutes. But the film does not end on triumph. It ends on Rhodes alone, screaming for the audience that has abandoned him, and on Marcia’s anguish at having destroyed the thing she made, and on a final uncertainty about whether the public, so easily seduced once, will simply find another idol tomorrow. The exposure works, but the film knows the appetite that made Rhodes possible has not been cured, only momentarily disappointed. The window the broadcast film leaves cracked is real but narrow, and what comes through it is as much warning as relief.

Why does Sweet Smell of Success deny the audience a satisfying punishment?

The film withholds catharsis to make its central point: the apparatus outlasts the individual. Hunsecker is the medium itself, so wounding him changes nothing structural, and the column prints again tomorrow. Granting clean justice would falsely suggest the system can be fixed by punishing one operator, which the film flatly refuses to believe.

The two endings together state the comparison’s final theme. The print film says the engine cannot be stopped, only its operators bruised. The broadcast film says the engine can be turned against itself, but only by someone inside it willing to pay the price, and even then the audience’s hunger remains. Neither ending is hopeful in any easy sense. The print film denies hope outright; the broadcast film offers a hope so costly and so provisional that it feels almost as dark. Between them they refuse the consolation that the apparatus of manufactured fame can be safely defeated, and that refusal, shared across two very different finales, is the surest sign that both films were telling the truth.

Reputation Over the Decades

The standing of both films rose steadily across the decades following their release, and the climb is instructive. At release, both were out of step with their audience. Sweet Smell of Success offered a vision of New York glamour so corrosive that audiences who came for stars stayed away from the poison, and the film underperformed. A Face in the Crowd asked a mass audience to watch itself be diagnosed as gullible, which is rarely a popular invitation, and it too failed commercially. Both were respected by some critics and dismissed by others as too harsh, too strange, too far ahead of the moment they were addressing.

Then the moment caught up. As the broadcast era matured and the fusion of media, celebrity, and political power became visible to everyone, A Face in the Crowd looked less like an exaggeration and more like a forecast, and its reputation climbed in proportion to how accurately it had predicted the world its first audience could not yet see. Sweet Smell of Success was rediscovered as a peak of its form, its dialogue quoted and studied, its photography cited as a high point of black and white cinematography, its vision of media corruption recognized as permanent rather than topical. The reappraisal of both films followed the same logic: a prophetic work looks excessive to the present it warns and accurate to the future it described, so its reputation rises as the future arrives. The durable framing is that their critical standing grew across the decades after release as the culture they diagnosed came fully into being, until both were secure among the essential films about media and power.

Closing Verdict

Watched as a pair, Sweet Smell of Success and A Face in the Crowd deliver a single argument in two voices, that media power is the manufacture of reputation, built and weaponized for profit and for influence, whether through the narrow poison of the column or the wide flood of the broadcast. The two films are not interchangeable. One is the perfect closed indictment of the operators who run the engine; the other is the imperfect open indictment of the audience that loves its products. One controls the facts; the other manufactures the feelings. One says the apparatus cannot be stopped; the other says it can be turned against itself only at great cost.

The deciding criterion is reach of prophecy, and by that measure A Face in the Crowd saw further, because it understood that the future would be shaped above all by what a vast audience could be made to feel and to choose, and it placed that audience, not the operators, at the center of its alarm. The column can ruin a man; the broadcast can elect one, and the film that grasped the electing crowd grasped the world that came. But the verdict is close, and the better object is arguably the colder, tighter print film, which remains the more flawless thing on its own terms even as its partner casts the longer shadow over the world we live in.

What both films finally share is the conviction that manufactured fame is not a scandal at the edge of public life but the engine at its center, and that the engine grows more powerful with every new medium that learns to carry charisma or insinuation to a crowd. They named the manufactured idol before the culture had fully built it, and the decades since have done nothing but confirm them. To watch them together is to receive a complete early diagnosis of the media age, delivered with the machinery still warm, by artists who stood inside the apparatus and pulled the panels off while it ran.

For readers who want to carry this comparison further, the natural next step is to keep working with the films themselves, returning to specific scenes and tracking the framework across each one. You can save and annotate this analysis and build your own watchlist free on VaultBook, organizing your notes on both films by director, theme, and the engine framework so the comparison stays at your fingertips. For students and teachers building a paper or a syllabus around media, persuasion, and mid-century American cinema, you can build a study guide and reference set on ReportMedic to assemble the close-reading material, the comparative table, and the historical context into a structured resource you can study from and cite.

Complicity: The Press Agent and the Producer

The two films center on two figures who serve the engine without owning it, and comparing them sharpens the moral question both pictures ask. Falco in Sweet Smell of Success and Marcia in A Face in the Crowd are the human servants of the apparatus, the people who feed the column and build the broadcast star, and what separates them is the presence or absence of a conscience.

Falco is complicity without remorse, at least until the very end. He ferries lies upward to Hunsecker and favors downward to clients, and he does it with a hustler’s energy and no visible moral floor, because the engine he serves has trained him to treat conscience as a luxury he cannot afford. His tragedy is not that he chooses evil but that the system has made the choice for him, leaving him a man of real gifts spending all of them on flattery and destruction. When the engine finally turns on him, he is beaten and discarded, and the film grants him no redemption because the print apparatus in its vision has no room for one. Falco is what the column makes of an ambitious man with no protection: a tool that is used until it breaks.

Marcia is complicity with a conscience, and that single difference reorganizes everything. She too serves the engine, discovers Rhodes and builds him into a national force, and she does it out of a mixture of idealism, attraction, and ambition that the film treats with real sympathy. But unlike Falco, she retains the capacity for horror, the ability to see what she has helped create and to recoil from it. Her arc is the arc of a person who serves the machine, comes to understand what the machine is, and then chooses to sabotage it at enormous personal cost. The presence of a Marcia is what gives the broadcast film its moral architecture, its sense that a human being inside the apparatus can still act, where the print film offers only operators who cannot.

The contrast between the two servants states the comparison’s moral theme in miniature. The print apparatus, as Sweet Smell of Success imagines it, consumes its human servants and leaves no room for conscience, because the engine is sealed and self-sufficient. The broadcast apparatus, as A Face in the Crowd imagines it, can be resisted from within by a servant who develops a conscience, though only at a cost that scars her permanently. Falco breaks; Marcia chooses. The difference is the difference between a film that believes the system is total and a film that believes a single human refusal can still matter, even if it cannot cure the appetite that made the monster possible.

Two American Settings: The City and the Country

The geography of the two films is not incidental, and the contrast between the city of the column and the country roots of the broadcast star carries part of each film’s meaning. Sweet Smell of Success is the most urban of films, a picture that could only happen in the concentrated nighttime Manhattan of nightclubs, newspaper offices, and crowded sidewalks, where the players are pressed together in a single ecosystem of favor and fear. The city is the natural habitat of the column, because the column is an instrument of the cultural in-crowd, and the in-crowd lives in the city’s small overlapping circles. The claustrophobia of the setting is the claustrophobia of the medium: a sealed world of insiders trading in reputation, with the glare of the neon standing in for the exposure of the printed paragraph.

A Face in the Crowd begins in the rural South, in a county jail in Arkansas, and the journey of the film is the journey from the country to the city and from the local to the national, the path of the broadcast itself as it carries a country voice to an urban network and then to the whole nation. The rural origin is essential to Rhodes’s power, because his authenticity is coded as country authenticity, the plain-spoken man from the heartland whom the audience trusts precisely because he seems untouched by the slick city. The film understands that the broadcast’s great trick is to carry the appearance of rural plainness into every living room, manufacturing a sense of homespun trust at national scale. The movement from the Arkansas jail to the New York network is the movement of manufactured authenticity going to market, the country voice industrialized and sold.

The settings thus encode the difference between the two engines once more. The column belongs to the city, to the dense, sealed world of insiders, and its power is the power of proximity and exclusion. The broadcast belongs to the whole country, reaching from the rural jail to the national audience, and its power is the power of scale and reach, the ability to carry a manufactured plainness to millions who will mistake it for the real thing. The city film is bounded by its setting; the country-to-city film is defined by its movement across the whole national map. Even the geography tells you which medium reached further, and which fear was the larger one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why is the dialogue in Sweet Smell of Success so celebrated?

The screenplay by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman built a heightened, stylized New York speech that sounds like nothing real people say and yet captures something truer than transcription, the sense that every sentence is a move in a game of leverage. The lines are dense with alliteration, reversal, and threat, and the most famous of them compress an entire moral view into a handful of words. Lehman knew the publicity world firsthand, so the talk has the authenticity of a private dialect, while Odets brought the weight of social drama. The result is dialogue that is the theme rather than a comment on it: because the column runs on words, the film runs on words, and the cruelty of the talk is the cruelty of the medium.

Q: How did A Face in the Crowd predict television demagoguery?

The film mapped the full mechanism by which broadcast charisma converts into political power. It showed a folksy authenticity that scales through the airwaves, an applause device that manufactures consent, a sponsor who learns that irreverence outsells information, and finally a stiff politician rebranded as a homespun everyman by a man who privately despises the public. Kazan and Schulberg grounded all of this in the open statement, voiced by a cynical power broker, that the masses must be guided and the broadcast is the instrument. Rather than predicting a specific technology, the film predicted a recurring structure, the fusion of media, celebrity, and politics, which is why it reads as forecast rather than period piece. The future it described was not a particular figure but a pattern that recurs whenever a medium learns to carry performed sincerity to a crowd.

Q: What does Sweet Smell of Success say about media power?

The film argues that media power is the power to define reality for people who cannot check the source. Hunsecker’s column is read as a record of truth, and the horror is that the public cannot tell the difference between what it reports and what it invents. The columnist holds the audience’s trust and spends it on private wars, and the audience never knows because it has no independent access to the facts. The danger, in this account, is epistemological: concentrated media power severs people from any reality except the one the channel supplies, so that a placed lie becomes accepted truth simply because it appeared in a trusted place. The film’s bleakness comes from its conviction that there is no remedy inside the system, since the system is the only source of the facts, and the apparatus survives every scandal that touches its operators.

Q: How does Andy Griffith play against type in A Face in the Crowd?

Griffith was a comic performer with no dramatic reputation when he took the role of Lonesome Rhodes in his screen debut, and the casting against his warm public image is central to the film’s effect. He builds a folksy charm so convincing that audiences inside and outside the film fall for it, then lets a private contempt show through the cracks until the gap between the two becomes the engine of dread. The lore that Kazan’s coaching drove him so far into the part that he struggled to climb out points to the film’s subject: Rhodes is a performance all the way down, a manufactured authenticity, and playing him meant manufacturing it too. The performance shows exactly how seductive and how hollow a broadcast sincerity can be, and it remains his most intricate work precisely because it weaponizes the very likability he was known for.

Q: How do Sweet Smell of Success and A Face in the Crowd both portray media corruption?

Both films treat manufactured reputation as the core corruption, but they study it from opposite ends. Sweet Smell of Success looks at the print column as a sealed circuit where a planted item becomes fact by being printed, focusing on the operators who run the engine and the favor-and-fear economy among insiders. A Face in the Crowd looks at the broadcast as an open flood where a folksy performance becomes trust by being aired, focusing on the audience and the convertibility of their affection into power. One portrays corruption as the poisoning of the few who manufacture fame; the other portrays it as the seduction of the many who consume it. Read together, they anatomize both the supply side and the demand side of media power, the manufacture of fact and the manufacture of feeling, giving a far more complete picture of the corruption than either delivers alone.

Q: Why has A Face in the Crowd grown more relevant over time?

The film failed commercially on release because it asked a mass audience to watch itself diagnosed as gullible, an unpopular invitation, and many viewers found it too harsh. Its standing rose steadily across the following decades as the world it described came into being. As the fusion of media, celebrity, and political power became visible to everyone, the portrait of a manufactured populist whose broadcast charisma converts into political clout looked less like exaggeration and more like forecast. Because its insight was never about a specific technology but about a recurring structure, the rise of new media that carry charisma to a crowd kept reenacting its argument rather than dating it. A prophetic work looks excessive to the present it warns and accurate to the future it described, so the film’s reputation grew in exact proportion to how fully its predictions arrived.

Q: Who was the real-life model for J.J. Hunsecker in Sweet Smell of Success?

The columnist Hunsecker was modeled on Walter Winchell, the most powerful newspaper and radio commentator in mid-century America, whose syndicated verdicts could make or break public figures and whose rapid broadcast delivery reached audiences in the tens of millions. The connection deepens the double bill in a striking way, because Winchell also appears as himself in a cameo inside A Face in the Crowd, one of several real broadcasters Kazan recruited to lend his fable a documentary texture. So the same historical figure sits at the root of both films at once, fictionalized into a print villain in one and physically present in the other. That overlap is part of why the two pictures feel less like coincidental companions than like two studies of a single apparatus of manufactured fame, caught as it migrated from the page to the screen.

Q: How does James Wong Howe’s cinematography shape Sweet Smell of Success?

Howe shot nighttime Manhattan in a high-contrast black and white where neon blows out into glare and doorways drop into pure shadow, and the visual logic carries the film’s meaning. Light here is not warmth but exposure, the thing a press agent both craves and fears, since to be seen by the column is to be at its mercy. Howe underlit interiors so faces emerge and submerge as people move, which suits a story about people who survive by controlling what others are allowed to see. The crowded nightclub frames turn the social world into an arena where reputation is the only blood sport in season. The photography is often cited as a peak of black and white craft because it makes the city beautiful and lethal at once, embodying the column’s power in pools of hard light and engulfing dark rather than merely illustrating it.

Q: What makes the ending of A Face in the Crowd so memorable?

The destruction of Rhodes locates his vulnerability in the medium itself, which is what gives the finale its force. Marcia, who discovered and built him, finally turns the machine against its master by leaving a microphone live over the end credits, so the home audience hears Rhodes off guard, mocking his viewers as idiots and sneering at the candidate he is supposed to sell. The contempt always hidden behind the grin pours into millions of living rooms in his own voice, and his career collapses in the time an elevator takes to descend. But the film refuses triumph, ending on Rhodes screaming for the audience that has abandoned him and on Marcia’s anguish at destroying what she made. The exposure works, yet the appetite that made him remains uncured, so the ending offers a hope so costly and provisional it feels almost as dark as no hope at all.

Q: What can a screenwriter learn from Budd Schulberg’s script for A Face in the Crowd?

Schulberg’s screenplay teaches that a warm, folksy vernacular can be the most dangerous voice in the room. He writes Rhodes in a down-home idiom of country yarns and homespun asides, and the genius is that this plainness is the weapon: the audience trusts Rhodes because he seems to talk like them, and the film shows that plainness being engineered and aimed. A writer learns from it that the appearance of authenticity can be the most manufactured thing on screen, and that media power finally rests on whoever controls the words a mass audience hears. The script also builds a complete rise-and-fall structure that doubles as a social diagnosis, tracing one career from a county jail to the brink of national political power, which models how a single character arc can carry an argument about a whole culture without ever stopping to state it directly.

Q: How does the applause machine work in A Face in the Crowd?

The applause machine is a device, operated by a technician, that supplies manufactured cheering on cue, and it is the film’s sharpest single image of the medium it dissects. The enthusiasm the home audience hears is not real; it is fabricated and fed to viewers who experience it as genuine, so the broadcast manufactures not only the star but the crowd’s reaction to the star. A viewer at home, hearing the applause, joins a consensus that was assembled in a control booth rather than felt by a real crowd. Long before the vocabulary existed, the film had diagnosed engineered consent, the sense of belonging to a mass approval that was in fact constructed for the viewer to join. The machine literalizes the film’s whole thesis: that the broadcast does not transmit feeling so much as manufacture it, then hand it back to the audience as their own.

Q: Was A Face in the Crowd based on a true story or a book?

The film was adapted by Budd Schulberg from his own short story, sometimes titled around the figure of the Arkansas traveler, which appeared in a 1953 collection of his stories. It is not a literal true story, but it is a composite diagnosis drawn from the real media culture of its moment, and Kazan reinforced that grounding by casting real broadcasters and commentators in cameos as themselves, blurring the line between fable and reportage. The film was produced under a working title drawn from that source material before becoming A Face in the Crowd, a phrase that names the human-interest radio segment where the story begins. The adaptation expands the short story into a full rise-and-fall arc that follows its demagogue from a county jail to the edge of national political power, turning a brief tale into a sweeping study of broadcast persuasion.

Q: Why did Sweet Smell of Success disappoint at the box office on release?

The film offered a vision of New York glamour so corrosive that audiences who came expecting their stars in flattering roles found instead a study of poison, and they stayed away. Tony Curtis, known for lighter pictures, played a press agent with no moral floor, and Burt Lancaster played a columnist of pure menace, casting choices that defied audience expectations. The unrelieved bleakness, with almost no character to like and no comforting resolution, made the film a hard sell in its moment. Its reputation climbed steadily across the following decades, as its dialogue was quoted and studied, its photography cited as a high point of its craft, and its portrait of media corruption recognized as permanent rather than topical. The gap between its initial reception and its eventual standing is the natural fate of a film that was harsher and more prophetic than its first audience wanted.

Q: How does Tony Curtis’s Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success play against his image?

Curtis had been dismissed as a handsome lead in lightweight pictures, and Falco let him deepen and darken that persona into one of the era’s most uncomfortable studies of ambition. He plays the press agent as a man always selling, always angling, his charm a tool deployed with such constant force that the exhaustion underneath shows through. Falco performs warmth because warmth is his only currency, and the tragedy is that he is good at it, good enough to glimpse the better man he might have been without the engine that requires him to spend his gifts on flattery and lies. The role inverts the easy charm Curtis was known for, turning likability into something desperate and corroded. It remains a landmark of an actor using a part to break his own type, and it gave the film its most human and most pitiable figure.

Q: What later films were influenced by Sweet Smell of Success and A Face in the Crowd?

Both films seeded lasting lineages in the cinema of media and power. A Face in the Crowd built the template of the manufactured populist whose charisma outruns any check on it, and the later satires of the television industry, with their portraits of networks chasing audiences past any moral floor, descend directly from its diagnosis. Sweet Smell of Success cast a long shadow over the cinema of the predatory operator, the cold studies of people who trade in other people’s reputations, and its stylized dialogue became a permanent reference point for writers capturing the sound of leverage and contempt. The two pictures founded two distinct traditions, the cinema of the seducible crowd and the cinema of the poisonous insider, and both remain fertile because both engines they anatomized, the broadcast and the column, continued operating and evolving long after the films were made.