Neal\u2019s own life shares some fascinating parallels with that of her character, radio reporter Marcia Jeffries. Like her, Neal was born in rural America \u2013 Arkansas for Jeffries, coal-town Kentucky for Neal. And like her, Neal went to a tony college \u2013 Northwestern for her, Sarah Lawrence for Jeffries. Both have the sort of intrepidness that comes from being raised in the sort of areas often dismissed and condescended to by coastal elites; according to April Wolfe\u2019s Criterion essay, New York Times<\/em> critic Bosley Crowther once called Neal \u201cgauche.\u201d She was thirty when Kazan cast her off his stage production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof<\/em> \u2013 too old for an ingenue \u2013 and had already been through the Hollywood studio wringer before. But Kazan rightly sensed that her indelible mixture of headstrong charm and doe-like delicacy would be a good fit for Jeffries\u2019s unsteady ambitions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She\u2019s the one who comes up with the name \u201cLonesome\u201d and first conceives of his potential. They meet in the drunk tank of a county jail, which Martha enters with a breezy naivete. She\u2019s there to record her program \u201cA Face in the Crowd\u201d but most of the inmates aren\u2019t interested in talking to her. Rhodes can carry a mean tune, though, and she\u2019s taken enough by his cornpone bravado to ask to do a piece on him, the wheels in her head turning as quickly as the ones on her taping device. \u201cWhat\u2019s in it for me?\u201d he wants to know. It\u2019s a mutually parasitic pattern that will continue to repeat itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Rhodes has a knack for speaking to the people who consider themselves unheard, and it\u2019s not long before his antics take him to a bigger platform. He whisks Jeffries along with him to Memphis where the more he chafes against the demands of television bigwigs the more the audience adores him. She remains equally befuddled and beguiled by his outrageous behavior, particularly his dalliances with various women. As savvy as Rhodes is with exploiting the folksy image that others have of him, Jeffries proves equally willing to use her feminine wiles to get what she wants from him. <\/p>\n\n\n As Rhodes moves from shilling dubious vitamin pills to a higher sphere of sinister America First political influence, Jeffries finds herself increasingly cut off from his boy\u2019s club. But she seems more at home in the writer\u2019s room run by Mel Miller (Walter Matthau, looking as fresh-faced as he ever got) where her husky-voiced, almost accidental confidence fits more naturally with their cigarette cynicism. Rhodes\u2019s romantic sway over her proves hard to shake, though, leading to the film\u2019s most painful scene, where a jilted Jeffries demands fifty percent of his business stake after he elopes with a high school beauty queen. \u201cI\u2019m gonna get something I deserve,\u201d she spits at him, but it\u2019s the flashes of vulnerability in Neal\u2019s eyes that linger in the memory. Once she disappears from Rhodes\u2019s life, there\u2019s no check on his baser instincts and whatever thin veneer of accountability was left dissolves into open vitriol for the people who built him up. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps because of this ingrained pessimism, courtesy of Budd Schulberg\u2019s piquant script, A Face in the Crowd<\/em> was not a hit with audiences and it received no awards recognition. Neal did six years later, winning the Best Actress Oscar for her role in Hud<\/em>. By then much of her time was spent in England, where she lived with her husband, author Roald Dahl, and their children. It was a union marked by tragedy and perseverance \u2013 their son Theo suffered from brain damage related to a car accident and eldest daughter Olivia died at age seven from measles encephalitis. Neal herself had three cerebral aneurysms in 1965 and was briefly in a coma. She recovered but her screen appearances were sporadic, and she never had a role quite as substantial as Marcia Jeffries again.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n If there\u2019s a hero in A Face in the Crowd<\/em> it\u2019s Jeffries, who eventually orchestrates Rhodes\u2019s downfall as single-handedly as she did his rise. It\u2019s this aspect that might require the greatest leap of faith from modern audiences, who\u2019ve yet to see Trump\u2019s stranglehold on his followers loosen no matter how abhorrent and insulting his rhetoric gets. But in that moment at least, Neal makes us believe it\u2019s possible. After all, sometimes the best person to slay a monster is the one who created him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “A Face in the Crowd” is streaming on Hoopla<\/a> and available for digital rental or purchase<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/face2-1024x576.jpg\")
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