The Day of the Locust is a 1975 American satirical historical drama film directed by John Schlesinger. It stars Donald Sutherland, Karen Black, William Atherton, Burgess Meredith, Richard Dysart, John Hillerman, and Geraldine Page.
Set in Hollywood, California, just before World War II, the film conveys the alienation and desperation of a disparate group of people whose dreams of success do not come true. The screenplay by Waldo Salt is based on the 1939 novel of the same title by Nathanael West.
The Day of the Locust garnered scholarly attention for its nightmarish depiction and acerbic commentary of the Hollywood film industry, and critical attention for its visually implicit horror elements.
Contents
Plot
Aspiring artist and recent Yale graduate Tod Hackett arrives in 1930s Hollywood to work as an art department production illustrator at a major film studio. He rents an apartment in the San Bernardino Arms, a rundown bungalow court whose occupants include many on the fringes of the industry. Among them are Faye Greener, a tawdry aspiring actress; her father Harry, an ex-vaudevillian; Abe Kusich, a dwarf who carries on a tempestuous relationship with his girlfriend, Mary; and Adore Loomis, a young boy whose mother hopes to turn him into a child star. Faye later meets Homer Simpson, a repressed accountant from a nearby up-scale neighborhood who lusts after her. Tod fills a crack in the wall of his unit with a red flower. Tod befriends Faye, and attends a screening of a film in which she has a bit part, accompanied by Earle Shoop, a cowboy she is dating. Faye is disappointed her appearance has been severely truncated. Faye declines Tod's attempts at romance Faye, telling him she'll only marry a rich man.
Tod attends a party at the Hollywood Hills mansion where partygoers watch stag films. Despite her hesitations, Faye continues to spend time with Tod. At a campfire in a canyon in the hills, a drunken Tod becomes enraged when Faye dances with Earle's friend Miguel. He assaults her but she fends him off. When Faye and Homer take Harry to a holy roller church gathering, a female preacher known as Big Sister performs a public "healing" to cure his heart ailment, but he subsequently dies. To pay for Harry's funeral costs, Faye begins prostituting herself.
The shy, obsessive Homer cares for Faye after her father's death and the two move in together. Faye can only find work as an extra. While filming a Waterloo-themed period drama, Faye survives a collapse of the set, witnessed by Tod. Faye and Homer attend a dinner theater with Tod which features a drag show as entertainment. Faye confesses to Tod her relationship with Homer is sexless, but loving and secure. Faye and Homer host a party attended by Tod, Abe, Earle, Miguel, and Claude Estee, a successful art director. Faye attempts to impress Claude and the other men and Homer watches them drunkenly fawning over her. Faye accuses Homer of being a peeping tom. Homer later walks in on Faye having sex with Miguel. Tod ignores the ensuring commotion, but Earle begins fighting with Miguel.
Faye attends the gala premiere of The Buccaneer at Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Tod, stuck in traffic, sees Homer and tries to talk to him. Homer ignores him and sits on a bench near the theater. Adore, attending the premiere with his mother, teases Homer with a song that Faye would often sing. Homer chases Adore through the crowd, and stomps him to death in a parking lot. Adore's screams draws a crowd that catches Homer, and beats him viciously as a full-blown riot erupts. An announcer at the premiere mistakes the riot as enthusiasm for the film. Faye is assaulted in the melee, Tod suffers a compound fracture to his leg, and a car is flipped over, igniting a fire that quickly spreads. Tod witnesses the apparitions of numerous faceless, Goyaesque figures from his paintings descending on the scene.
Later, Faye enters Tod's abandoned apartment and sees everything is gone except for the flower in the wall crack. Her eyes well with tears.
Analysis
Film scholar M. Keith Booker views The Day of the Locust as "one of the nastiest film critiques ever produced of the film industry itself," that depicts Hollywood as a "nightmare realm dominated by images of commodified sex and violence." Booker notes that the film aims to depict Hollywood and greater Los Angeles as a "dumping ground upon which broken dreams can be discarded to make way for the ever newer dreams constantly being turned out by the American Culture Industry."
Lee Gambin of ComingSoon.net considers The Day of the Locust a "non-horror film that is secretly a horror film... a genuinely terrifying venture into the dark recesses of not only an industry that eats its product, vomits it back up and scoffs it down again, but a wonderful critique on human ugliness and desolation."
Production
The apartment building was also used as a set for The Fortune.
Release
Box office
Released in the spring of 1975, The Day of the Locust was considered a box-office flop upon its release.
Critical response
In his review in The New York Times, Vincent Canby called it "less a conventional film than it is a gargantuan panorama, a spectacle that illustrates West's dispassionate prose with a fidelity to detail more often found in a gimcracky Biblical epic than in something that so relentlessly ridicules American civilization... The movie is far from subtle, but it doesn't matter. It seems that much more material was shot than could be easily fitted into the movie, even at 144 minutes... It is reality projected as fantasy. Its grossness — its bigger-than-life quality — is so much a part of its style (and what West was writing about) that one respects the extravagances, the almost lunatic scale on which Mr. Schlesinger has filmed its key sequences."
Jay Cocks of Time said; "The Day of the Locust looks puffy and overdrawn, sounds shrill because it is made with a combination of self-loathing and tenuous moral superiority. This is a movie turned out by the sort of mentality that West was mocking.
Salt's adaptation... misses what is most crucial: West's tone of level rage and tilted compassion, his ability to make human even the most grotesque mockery."
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called it a "daring, epic film... a brilliant one at times, and with a wealth of sharp-edged performances," citing that of Donald Sutherland as "one of the movie's wonders," although he expressed some reservations, noting that "somewhere on the way to its final vast metaphors, The Day of the Locust misplaces its concern with its characters. We begin to sense that they're marching around in response to the requirements of the story, instead of leading lives of their own. And so we stop worrying about them, because they're doomed anyway and not always because of their own shortcoming."
In the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum described the film as "a painfully misconceived reduction and simplification... of the great Nathanael West novel about Hollywood... It misses crucial aspects of the book's surrealism and satire, though it has a fair number of compensations if you don't care about what's being ground underfoot — among them, Conrad Hall's cinematography and... one of Donald Sutherland's better performances."
Channel 4 deemed it "fascinating, if flawed" and "by turns gaudy, bitter and occasionally just plain weird," adding "great performances and magnificent design make this a spectacular and highly entertaining film."