A Face in the Crowd (1957)

Elia Kazan and the writer Budd Schulberg follow Lonesome Rhodes, a drifter with a guitar, from a county jail to a television empire and a seat beside a presidential hopeful. Andy Griffith, years before his cozy sitcom image, plays him as charm curdling into contempt for the audience that adores him. The target is the marriage of mass media and populist politics, and it has aged into prophecy rather than period piece. It is more drama than gag machine, so come for the dread as much as the laughs.