Richie-67-485852 Most excellent entertainment bar none for its story-telling, believability and delivery. It all unfolds like a beautiful flower being filmed in fast-action photography and just as stunning too. Andy Griffith holds the viewer spellbound as does the supporting cast of characters. All give all they have making it a pleasure to watch. I always look to see if a movie has memorable scenes and this one is loaded with them making it a must see over and over. Hollywood should take note here. What happened to loving what one does? Bring back quality films and viewers will flock to the theaters. If not, cable and streaming is the watch-word. How about some passion, caring and good acting and scripts? Use this film to show you how it is done. Great movie to eat with and for snacking too. Make this...

strumdatjag This sat in my DVR Cache for a bit, before I cued it up - it's an absolute 10/10. Andy Griffith, before he moved into Aunt Bea's house in Mayberry, is electrifying on screen. Other great performances by Walter Matthau, Patricia Neal, Lee Remick and even Tony Franciosa (before he became an ubiquitous TV co-star on things like Hotel and The Love Boat). The director Elia Kazan had previously directed one of the greatest films ever filmed, "On the Waterfront" and other classics (Streetcar/Desire, Tree/Brooklyn . . . ). Put this one alongside those films. Well-filmed, well-acted, well-written. Imaginative. Still relevant. Running out of superlatives. WOW!!!!!!

antcol8 It's Twilight Zone. With all that implies, both good and bad. That style of the '50s, where this little cabal of oh - so - smart Liberal screenplay writers impose their critiques of Big Business and Madison Avenue on any consistency of created characters. So it becomes a kind of soapbox. I might agree with all of it - why not? But it's not good cinema - everything is just way too spelled out. Liberalism has failed - it degenerated into Neoliberalism. And yet,we all need to watch this film. It presages the Trump era brilliantly (not that he was the first, by any means, to work the liminal space between Show Biz and Politics). So it's a great document. And it's also an episode of the Zone expanded into 2 hours. But part of the greatness of, say, The Monsters are Due on Maple Street is its 1/2 hour length. Andy Griffith is good here. But, you know me...I would've preferred Claude Akins.Walter Matthau's monologue about Marcia and about his book - in fact, that whole section of the film - is dreadful. Overwritten and tin - eared. Patricia Neal starts the film out so beautifully - somebody else here called her performance "luminous" - and as the writing goes down the drain, so does her performance. Down, down, into pseudo - Tennessee Williams territory:"Marcia!"Watch the first hour with both eyes on the screen. And for the second one, keep one eye on the film while perusing, say, a Huey Long biography with the other eye.The ending? King Lear meets The Obsolete Man. That says what it says.I wonder what would've happened if those Kazans and Schulbergs and Chayefskys, etc. could've interrogated and implicated their own Liberal Allrightnik sensibilities? Then Auto - Derision wouldn't be a term only used in French.

kapelusznik18 ***SPOILERS*** Years ahead of its time movie in how the American public can be manipulated, like it is today, by a smooth talking demigod who uses the electronic media of radio & televising to fool it into thinking that he or she, with women now so prominent in US politics,is the greatest kindest and most of all righteous person that ever walked the face of the universe. That's until feeling invincible as well as all powerful he slips up and is exposed like the main character of the movie Larry Lonesome Rhodes, Andy Griffith, and forced against his will to face the hard reality, or Karma, of his sleazy and immoral actions.Discovered at a jail house drunk tank by local radio personality Marcia Jeffries, Patricia Neal,in rural Arkansas the home of the former Prsident of the United States William Jefferson "Slick Willie" Clinton Larry right away with his boyish good looks so impressed her in his folksy delivery and skill of playing the guitar the Marcia quickly saw in him a combination of a Will Rogers and Hank Williams and puts him on the radio as soon as he dried himself out. Not at first interested in his new found fame Larry or Lonesome soon discovered that he can get people to buy products as well as later elect politicians by just putting in a good word for them on his talk & country & western music hillbilly radio/TV show. The people including Marcia that are behind Lonesome's incredible rise in the TV ratings and popularity never once notice that he was anything but the lovable country bumpkin that he made himself out to be but a Frankenstein monster!***SPOILERS*** IT was in fact Marcia who had fallen in love with the big jerk who was hurt in the most personal way by Lonesome dropping her for this young teenage chickadee the baton twirling Betty Lou Fleckum, Lee Remick, whom he also dropped after he got, as in with so many other women in his life, tired of her. Seething with both hatred and revenge as well as feeling hurt & deserted Marcia planned to show the real Lonesome Rhodes to the public, who are just crazy about him, for what he really is. And this came on rating week or sweeps for TV & radio with tens of millions of his fans and admirers tuning in to see and hear their hero.Like the saying goes "It's a dirty job but someone's got to do it" and Marcia's exposer of Lonesome, when he thought no one was listening in, was anything but pretty. Within minutes of the big show going off the air thousands of outraged listeners as well as it's sponsors, by canceling their sponsorship of his show, showed Lonesome just what they think about him! Not quit getting the picture in how badly he screwed himself up Lonesome in his rage to get the person who left the mike on when the shows credits were rolling down the TV screen was shocked to find out that the person that he trusted the most, even though he treated her like dirt, who was responsible for his sudden downfall was non other then Marcia Jeffries! What I got from the ending is that Lonesome Rhodes was so popular that the millions who tuned into his show didn't at the time bother to turn it off in being so impressed by it! Even in the last minute or so when it was going off the air which in the end made the greatest impact, in seeing or hearing what a low life creep he really was, on them!