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A Face in the Crowd (1957, USA, Kazan)

A drunkard hobo turned free-talking radio talk show host sells out to the corporate elite and becomes a bullshitter on national TV, a man who understands his mass audience so well that he despises them all. Watched it all. The Elvis era is barely a year old, and TV only a decade, and already the message movie folks believe they can see where it’s all headed: Individualism, sex, and consumerism, in a hot, steamy embrace. And they were right, it was. That’s what we got. And that’s not such a bad thing, considering the alternatives. But nobody can accuse the result of being honest.

The Night America Trembled (1957, USA)

This TV documentary tells the story of how Orson Welles’ 1938 War of the Worlds radiocast fooled thousands of gullible people into thinking they were being invaded by Martians – which itself is a myth that has fooled hundreds of millions of gullible people, and you’re probably one of them. Aren’t facts fun? Watched: 6 minutes.

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My Gun is Quick (1957, USA)

Well, something is changing in Hollywood. They barely even pretend any more that the women who hang around in cheap bars in hard-boiled detective stories aren’t prostitutes. And the hard-boiled private investigators are getting harder-boiled. Watched it all. It’s up there with the good noirs, and not in a phony retro way either. Robert  Bray punches like he believes it.