United Artists
It’s difficult now to imagine Hollywood conceiving a one-two punch as ferocious as Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd and Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success, which were released a month apart in the summer of 1957. Their target was the absolute corruption of media figures who acquire untrammeled fame and power: Face’s coarse cracker-barrel philosopher “Lonesome” Rhodes (Andy Griffith), an ex-hobo who becomes a politically influential TV superstar; and Sweet Smell ’s monstrous Broadway gossip columnist J J Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) whose Stalinesque sway has senators quaking at his restaurant table.