User Reviews

It took over 35 years and the collapse of the big studio system before anyone in Hollywood, in this case Paramount, brought Nathanael West's novel The Day Of The Locust to the big screen. That climax at a Hollywood premiere is certainly not something the studios would want to show the public as a typical event.

The book is based on West's experiences while writing B pictures in Hollywood during the Thirties and some of the characters he knew. His main protagonist is William Atherton, an aspiring artist who is making a living doing set designs. That's one competitive business and he's got to go over his immediate supervisor John Hillerman's head to get his work noticed by producer Richard Dysart. Like the rest of West's characters, he's sacrificed pride a long time ago. It's his eyes that we see the other characters through.

But he's a paragon of virtue compared to starlet Karen Black who will do anything and anybody to advance her career. Atherton would love to get something going with her, but he's mindful of how amoral she's become. Her only real attachment is to her father, an ex-vaudevillian and now door to door salesman, Burgess Meredith. Even trying to do his shtick with sales doesn't gain him clients.

But the saddest one in the lot and the fellow with the best performance is Donald Sutherland who is an outsider to the film people, a businessman named Homer Simpson who Black uses and abuses. Sutherland's performance is not too different from the hapless cartoon character. Imagine the cartoon Homer Simpson dealing with real life heartbreak and you've got Sutherland's character. The line between tragedy and comedy can be a very thin one.

Geraldine Page has a brief role as an Aimee Semple McPherson like evangelist, shamelessly bilking the Depression's downtrodden. She's great in the part as is Jackie Earle Haley, a really rotten child star of whom I'd love to know who West's model was.

The Day Of The Locust was directed by John Schlesinger who got an Oscar for The Midnight Cowboy. Like that film, The Day Of The Locust deals with some fringe people just trying to get by. Burgess Meredith got an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor and the film also got a nomination for Costume Design.

Before Newton Minow referred to television as a vast wasteland. I think that's what Nathanael West had in mind in writing about his experiences in the movie capital. I'd recommend seeing the film to see how well Schlesinger put West's vision across.

***SPOILERS*** Based on Nathanael West's 1939 short story "Day of the Locust" the film lives up to all it's hype even though it was hardly a smashing box office success back in 1975 when it was released. The movie starts out with young Harvard educated Tom Hackett, William Atherton, trying to get a job at a big Hollywood studio as one of its graphic and art designers. Living at the San Bernardino Arms Tom runs into a bunch of people who are also looking to make it big in Tinsel Town but keep running into dead ends. It's there where Tom meets aspiring actress Faye Greener, Karen Black, who's trying to break into the movies in her feeling that the grass is greener on the other side, Tensile Town, then where she's now living.

Tom in fact does get himself a good paying and prestigious job at Paramount Studios as a graphic designer but is somehow stuck on the part time actress, who's lucky to get cameo roles in the movies, Faye Greener who for some reason doesn't take advantage of Tom's position in getting her better roles. Faye as it turns out is into wild partying with the rough crowd that includes a number of Mexican cock fight enthusiasts which turns the very genteel and sensitive Tom off. In fact Tom himself gets corrupted by Faye's lifestyle in losing himself when he gets drunk and high on pot before a cock fight that gets him so horny and heated up that he almost ends up raping her.

There's also Faye's father the washed up vaudevillian song & dance man Harry Greener,Burgess Meredith,who's really pushing his luck, and weak heart, as a door to door snake oil salesman who what seems like hasn't made a single sale during the entire duration he's in the movie. As Harry's luck and heart starts to run out Faye in desperation tries to get him back to health by going to see faith healer Big Moma or Sister, Geraldine Page, at one of her sermons. This in fact does help Harry out a bit but before you know it his heart gives out from all the excitement and he dies halfway through the film.

The person who really steals the acting honors as well as the hearts of all of us watching the film is that sad eyed and repressed, in life love and everything else, dufus the homely and knuckle crunching Homer Simpson, Donald Southerland. Homer a transplanted Mid-Westerners has moved to the Sunshine State to live out his last years in peace and quite without expecting much excitement in doing that. it's when Homer runs into Faye who seems to have some feelings for him that his sad & sorry life starts to lighten up a bit. Faye just takes advantage of the sad sack by leading him on in that she's in love with him where at the same time is having it on with almost every man, except Homer & Tom, in the vicinity between San Bernardino to Beverly Hills.

The end comes when a very naive and heart sick Homer finds out that his live in companion Faye, who has no sexual relation with him at all, has been cheating and making a complete and total fool of him which causes Homer to have an emotional breakdown. This causes a heart broken Homer to pack up and head for who knows where who then runs into the bratty 12 year old Adore Loomis, Jackie Earl Haley, who's been unmercifully teasing the poor guy since the movie started. It's when Adore pushed the wrong button, by striking him in the head with a rock, that Homer finally lost it and that set the stage for the movies fairy climax. That all happened at the grand primer and opening of Cecil B. DeMill's latest multi million dollar spectacular cinema epic "The Buccaneer". By the time that the movie "Day of the Locust" was finally over it wasn't "The Buccaneer" that everyone remembered but the riot that Adore sparked which in fact ended up burning down all of Tinsel Town!

The 144 minute movie kept your interest with a number of weird sub-plots and strange characters thrown into it but that was nothing compared to it's final ten or so minutes when the earth, or Hollywood, caught fire in one of the most shocking and realistic disaster scenes,in what's not considered a disaster movie, in all of motion picture history! And that's without even the used of computer enhanced technology! Director John Schesinger staged the final riot scene much like the real life, and death, notorious April 9th 1948 "Bogotazo" that in a 24 hour period lead to the deaths and injuries of between 3,000 to 5,000 people and burned downtown Bogata Columbia to the ground.

Critically much maligned but really rather an outstanding screen adaptation of Nathanael West's 'difficult' novel about Hollywood in the 1930's and based on West's own experiences there as a 'hack' writer. The British director John Schlesinger helmed the picture, bringing much the same jaundiced eye to bear on proceedings as he did in "Midnight Cowboy". Waldo Salt wrote the excellent script and the outstanding cast included Karen Black as the wannabe actress trying to make it big in the movies, Burgess Meredith as her drunken father, William Atherton as the young art director in love with her and Donald Sutherland as the sad and lonely Homer Simpson that Black all but destroys and whose presence instigates the films tragic ending. The great Conrad Hall photographed the picture and the monstrous child is Jackie Earle Haley.

Many critics consider The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West to be the best novel ever written about Hollywood. The screen version directed by John Schlesinger and written by Waldo Salt is one of the most faithful adaptations of a book to film ever made. Initially overlooked upon it's release in 1974 (to mixed reviews), it has since developed a huge cult following and is now considered to be a forgotten masterpiece of 70's cinema.

It tells the story of Todd Hackett who comes to Hollywood in the 1930's (but it might as well take place in the present) hoping for a career in set design, he soon finds that the road to success in the film industry is a difficult one and his journey takes a downward spiral as he falls in with the users and abusers of Hollywood, the desperate, disillusioned souls who, consumed by boredom and their own emptiness, search out any abnormality in their insatiable lust for excitement - drugs, perversion, crime.

Aside from top-notch direction, the film contains gorgeous (Oscar nominated) cinematography by Conrad Hall, a haunting score by John Barry, authentic period costume and art design, and outstanding performances from the entire cast. Notably: William Atherton as Todd, Karen Black (her finest role) as Faye Greener, a selfish, wannabe actress and extra, Burgess Meredith (also Oscar nominated) as her alcoholic father and former vaudeville star, and an almost unrecognizable Donald Sutherland as the sensitive, socially retarded misfit who is torn apart by those around him and triggers the films much talked about finale.

One thing is for certain, anyone who has seen the last 20 minutes of this disturbing film will never forget it. A must-see for film students, art directors, and anyone interested in the "golden" years of Hollywood.

Related reading:

Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger

Play it as it Lays by Joan Didion

Less than Zero by Brett Easton Ellis

The Day of the Locust takes place in one of the most bizarre settings to have ever existed in the real world. Hollywood in the 1930s was a place of grand illusions, with an incredible power to change people's lives for the better, or for the worse. The relics of that time are, for the most part, the films that were churned out on sound stages, generally very wholesome and carefree. The reality of what went on offstage is largely a mystery, although it is safe to assume it wasn't all glamor and good times. The Day of the Locust is dark historical fiction, and is utterly fascinating. It is a journey through Hollywood's golden age, guided by someone who comes to Hollywood a typical dream seeker, who finds himself helpless under the pressure of the industry and the misleading tactics of those who rule the screen. The characters that come in and out of his life are caricatures of the aspiring actresses, child stars, and crew members that help make Hollywood truly troubled and deeply strange.

The Day of The Locust is an adaptation of the highly powerful novel from Nathanael West, it focuses on the seamy underbelly of Hollywood in the 1930s. Pot boiling with pacey precision, director John Schlesinger crafts what is still to this day one of the hidden pieces of art from the 1970s.

We are witness to an assortment of odd characters on the outskirts Hollywood and it's big shiny star, fringe characters driven on by less than stellar ideals. The centre of it all is Karen Black's sexy but untalented actress, Faye, she lives with her father, Harry {a fabulous Burgess Meredith}, who was once a fine stage performer but now is old and dying and forced to peddle potions on door steps. Faye realises that her limitations are getting in the way of her starry ambitions, so thus she becomes the assembly line hump on the casting couch, she believes it's a small price to pay for the price of fame.

Caught up in Faye's maelstrom of shallow conniving worthlessness is William Atherton's art director, Tod, and Donald Sutherland's sympathetic dolt, Homer Simpson {Sutherland stunning and Atherton a career best}. All three of them will come crashing together as the story reaches it's cynical and terrifying conclusion. The Day Of The Locust failed at the box office, mid seventies audiences were clearly not ready for this unsavoury and stark look at the flip side of the industry we all follow with relish. Many of the characters featured in the piece are believed to be based on real life Hollywood figures, now here in this modern age the public embrace such titillation with glee, back then they clearly wasn't ready for it.

Conrad Hall's cinematography was rightly nominated for an Academy Award, as was Burgess Meredith in the Best Supporting Actor category, but Sutherland, John Lloyd {Art} and Ann Roth {Costumes} were criminally ignored, but it matters not for now this film can be viewed by a wider more open thinking audience, and hopefully as the finale grips you round the throat {and it should do}, you will be forced to think about it for some time after. 9/10

For many years John Schlesinger's "Day of the Locust" was *that* movie with a character named Homer Simpson and that earned Burgess Meredith his first Oscar nomination one year before his second one for "Rocky". Apart from that if you told me the film was really about an apocalyptic invasion of grasshoppers, I would have believed you.

Simply said, "The Day of the Locust" is like a giant hallucination put into screen, certainly one of the most bizarre pieces of film-making of the 70s adapted from a 1939 novel by Nathaniel West about a certain moral degradation of America incarnated by Hollywood and its cohorts of delusional outcasts at the eve of World War II. Like the decadent Roman Empire before its downfall, or a modern Sodoma whose daily sunshine provides the illusion of a heaven in what might be the most hellish place to be.

This is a place indeed where people are so self-centered they let automatic sprinklers do the job, turning in mechanical nonchalance all day long in a way that mirrors their own monotonous routine, where the dregs of a falling society gather to fulfill some crazy dreams to make up for the broken ones, an existential dumping ground. In these Great Depression days, Los Angeles was an oasis for the Okies or wannabe starlets, the Mecca of cinema, the one industry that didn't suffer the crisis and yet the uncompromising portrait painted by Schlesinger is as gloomy and depressing as a close-up on a Goya painting.

It's hard to reduce "Locust" to a plot, this is more a series of dispatched events that involve different characters who meet together, interact, kiss, make love, express themselves to their most pathetic, authentic and awkward way and leave us viewers with interrogations we try to reassemble like pieces of a big nightmarish picture.

William Atherton who wasn't yet the cool-to-hate jerk of his 80s roles plays a handsome and ambitious set designer, assigned to storyboard a movie about the battle of Waterloo, which foreshadows a lot when you think about it. He picks a little bungalow called the 'Earthquake' one for the still non-repaired cracks on the wall and meets his neighbor, a poor man's Jean Harlow named Faye Greener and played by Karen Black; the first thing she sees in Todd is that he hasn't a car, she's the kind of woman who wouldn't pick any man but one that can make her feel important or with enough money to provide the illusion of luxury. She wants to make it big in Hollywood, whatever she lacks in acting, she makes up in pretension.

Her father Harry is a con-artist played by Meredith; every morning he visits houses, dancing and playing his little shtick to sell an elixir, he elicits a few smiles first but once the bottle shows up, exasperation ensues and doors are closed on his face. His performance (truly Oscar-worthy) says one thing: people can handle the oddest things but they're exiled in that very place for taking, not giving. There's something in his eyes filled with sorrow and lucidity, but he's got to stick to his routine, without it, he better be dead.

Speaking for giving, there's still a man who manages to be an outcast among the outcasts, Donald Sutherland is so heart-breaking as a meek accountant full of repressed feelings, that I didn't even laugh when he introduced himself. He accepts to sponsor Faye, chaperoning her so she can fulfill her dream, but it's a foregone conclusion that she will cheat on him, at least Tod had the merit of being rejected. What Faye sees in Homer is perhaps the fact that he sees something in her, he satisfies her narcissism and that's a good alternative for love.

There are other bizarre people who populate that pit of repulsiveness: an aggressive macho dwarf (Abe Kushish), an androgynous child, a religious bigot (Geraldine Page), the gallery is made of people who're all so genuinely insane that the closest to that implausible world is either a madhouse or hell... or maybe in a place where dreams are sold in form of movies, the human leftovers build their own reality through their delusion, a sort of isolation from the norm that turns L. A. into a purgatory. And at the end it all implodes in the way of a climax that is so brutally conceived, so graphic that the fact that the novel was written in 1939 takes its full meaning. But let's not overthink it, we're talking about the film.

When it ended, I kept scratching my head... would I watch it again? I don't think so. Is it a bad film? Far from it. Well acted? Certainly one of the best performances from Sutherland. Too many bizarre people? That was the year "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" won the Oscar. So what went wrong? Nothing, the film was a vision, had a vision, was based on a vision and not all the visions are promised to posterity, and maybe not the most nightmarish ones. I enjoyed the film to the degree that it kept hooking me from beginning to end but so did a masterpiece like "Freaks" and it wasn't a pleasant experience.

It's very telling that one year after, Schlesinger made a standard thriller with "Marathon Man", as if himself too had to get "Locust" off his head, as if that was the kind of creation you can't emerge totally unscathed from it. A strange film really that I'm in no hurry to watch it again... but I'm glad I did... for the performances of Meredith and Sutherland and for the relevance of the story.

One could certainly remake the novel and adapt it to our social-network era and the poisoning narcissism Internet generated... it so happens that yesterday I had the thought that our world was screwed, if anything, one should make a "Day of the Locust" for the 2020s.

Wow...

I've sat here in front of this blank for several minutes now.

I cannot find another word to describe this movie. The building tensions are handled so deftly, the ending, which must rank among the most harrowing scenes in all art, comes both as a surprise and as no surprise.

William Atherton, Karen Black, Donald Sutherland, Burgess Meredith, Richard Dysart - all incomparably perfect in every way in these roles.

Schlesinger is a master, the Barry score is cleverly arranged and the Hall photography and Clark editing, especially in the final sequence is just about the most prodigiously horrendous and horrific in all cinema.

I'm still shaking.

Based on one of Nathanael West's five short novels, this movie portrays and attacks Hollywood of the late 30s, just as the Nashville, released the same year, satirized Nashville. Although there have been many satires about the movie industry, none is quite as acerbic as this one.

Set in a Southwestern adobe apartment complex, the San Bernardino Arms, we see an assortment of Hollywood hopefuls, has beens, and want-to-bes as well as some hucksters and con men. The story is viewed through the eyes of Tod Hackett (William Atherton), a talented Yale sketch artist and set designer who actually does get a Hollywood job in his chosen field. Faye Greener (Karen Black) is there as an extra and dreams of making it big someday. She lives with her father, Harry Greener (Burgess Meredith), a washed up vaudevillian clown who goes from neighborhood to neighborhood, selling bottles of elixir, using his old vaudeville routine as a sales pitch.

Adore (Jackie Earle Haley) is the brat child actor with the stereotypical stage mother. Another REALLY obnoxious character is Abe Kusich (Billy Barty), a dwarf bookie who takes advantage of his difference, knowing that no one can really fight back—I've personally known people like this who use their apparent disadvantages to their own obnoxious advantage. (Both Adore and Abe fit into this category. I mean, who can lash out against a child or a dwarf?) Homer Simpson (Donald Sutherland) also belongs to this strange group of Hollywood misfits. He is really the ultimate outsider. He is a strange repressed accountant from the Midwest, who really wants to be loved for who he is. After Harry Greener's death, Faye, uses Homer---for his money and slavish love —as long as his unrequited worship of her remains intact.

Most of the men love Faye and want her as their girlfriend or lover. She almost drives Tod crazy, since he tries to get her to love him, but she says something like 'I don't love you that way.' When he asks her why she would have sex for money, she screams 'That's different!! They are STRANGERS!!!' The asexual Homer is different too: He just loves to be around her and cook for her.

"Big Sister (Geraldine Page)—who could have been based on Aimee Semple McPherson—is the woman evangelist begging for money in exchange for promises of everlasting live, health, and happiness is Hollywood's religion, 'the false, utopian theology California is famous for."

I'm not sure what the symbolism is behind the movie's constant motif of cockfighting. It could represent male sexual competition (cock fighting) or it could be the need for voyeuristic nihilism so prevalent in Hollywood.

The final scene of the movie is very long. (And I think it is way overdone.) It starts with a Hollywood premier of Cecil B. DeMille's The Buccaneer (1938)and ends in chaos, death, and destruction. The movie is mostly filmed through a yellow lens, suggesting 'sunny' Southern California.

I have waited almost 30 years to see this film. For one reason or another, the stars were never properly aligned to allow me to see it prior to seeing it for the first time this evening. I had heard and read about how shocking and powerful it was. How the performances were likely some of the best during the seventies, and on and on. So today, I went out, bought the DVD (disappointed to find no additional extras on the DVD), and watched it tonight. I was expecting an exciting, gripping movie that would make me feel it was worth the wait.

It wasn't. To say I was disappointed is putting it mildly. I'm still trying to rehash and pour over all of what was bad about this film.

It's not a good expose on the ugly side of Hollywood. "Sunset Boulevard" and "The Bad and the Beautiful" do a much better job of that. Performances from Burgess Meridith, William Atherton, and Billy Barty are very good. Donald Sutherland is a little too freakish, and Karen Black is plainly miscast. I find nothing beautiful, sensual or sexual about her. I even found myself fast forwarding through some of her scenes. I just couldn't believe her.

I believe John Schlesinger should have edited this movie down some. By the end, I was so bored and couldn't wait for the movie to end, that I didn't care about the ending.

In the end, "The Day of the Locust" turns out to be an overblown, overlong, boring disappointment.

5 out of 10

I saw this film in 1986 and I was very thrilled. But it had even more impact on me when I came to L.A. for the first time two years later. It seemed as if the movie had exposed parts of the soul of this strange city to me. Many people I met there - some of them became friends - seemed to share features of the characters in "The Day of the Locust", maybe it had something to do with their unfulfilled dreams and their lack of success. One seems to understand who Hollywood an the movie industry became the way they are now. Another aspect of the picture is the incomparable feeling of horror it lays on you - even though the sun is shining most of the time and you have no idea what will actually happen in the end. I would love to see this film again ever since, but it's so hard to find. Only a single one of my friends has even heard of it. In my view one of Schlesingers masterpieces, strangely underrated and almost forgotten.

John Schlesinger's film of Nathanael West's probably-unfilmmable book about early Hollywood has some amazing set-pieces, but as a whole it doesn't quite work. The depiction of day-to-day life in 1930s Los Angeles, the collapse of a movie-set during filming, and any scene involving desperate, pathetic ex-vaudevillian Burgess Meredith are vibrant, scary and real. However, the frenzied climax (done up as a surreal nightmare) is pretentious, and Karen Black struggles with her role as a Hollywood hopeful. William Atherton as a burgeoning art director and Donald Sutherland as a shy milquetoast are not able to contribute much, and the pacing is so slow it's difficult to stay involved with what's happening. At first I thought the picture looked exactly right, but as the movie wore on, I began to get impatient with the too-careful design of the thing (and Conrad Hall's washed-out cinematography seems glassy, though the esteemed Hall did receive an Oscar nomination for his work). Many good moments in search of a masterpiece, but "The Day of the Locust" is ultimately a misfire. **1/2 from ****

I used to really like this movie and considered it more of horror movie and it did and still does in away scare and creep me out . Unfortunately, seeing it again it's mostly just depressing and not well made . It does have its moments but it is not a good movie. In a way as a defender after all these years it hurts me to say it. But I still think it should be part of film history. A movie to be critized for it's strengths and all of it's weaknesses. It's an important but forgotten film. Just not a good one. Take John Barry's score for instance...... He has never been so far removed. He can take a fair movie and make it good. A bad movie and make it entertaining. With Day of the Locust, John Barry sounds like he just wanted to get out as soon as he could. Take his score for FRANCES. Beautiful, like he spent a whole hour in his shrinks chair smiling but still sad. Day of the Locust... Well he decided just to stay home and play couple of notes waiting for Jessica Kange

I first saw "Day of the Locust" because I thought Karen Black was keen. I liked the film, but I can't say I understood its point at the time. What's with the faceless people, Sutherland's hands, and the angry dwarf? Sounds like David Lynch to me, especially in light of "Mulholland Drive" and its scathing, unsympathetic view of Hollywood (it even has a cowboy!)

I finally got around to reading the Nathanael West novel -- which is absolutely brilliant -- and decided to watch the film again. And I need to say that, as much as I still appreciate and enjoy the movie, it really missed the boat, trying to cram bits and pieces of ideas from the novel (the strange, artificial relationship between Faye and her father, the barely-restrained violence of those who "come to Hollywood to die," the anachronistic and cold facade of Hollywood and the people in charge of it), meanwhile stuffing in some 70's ideas, reflecting back on the beginnings of WWII (which wasn't an issue in the book at all), and -- strangely enough -- adding warmth and humanity to characters whose sole characteristic (in the novel) was that they had NO warmth or humanity whatsoever.

And that's the weird thing about this movie. I remember, when I first saw it, I was amazed at how unlikeable all the characters were. After reading the book, however, I can say that the characters in the movie are FAR TOO likeable to support any of the book's themes. This is most notable when it comes to Faye's little breakdowns, letting the viewer know that she's really a good person who wants to be loved, turning her into a VICTIM of the star system. But the point of the book -- as I gathered, anyway -- was that these people aren't victims at all. They're greedy people who victimize each-other, and usually in sloppy, stupid ways ("Jeepers, Creepers!") Faye isn't capable of an unaffected tender moment, all she can do is pretend. The same goes for her father: even his moments of genuine sickness and pain are filtered through his never-ending vaudeville routine.

Homer Simpson, as well, is portrayed (in the film) as a sort of unfortunate lump, and a bible-thumper to boot, taken advantage of by Faye. But that destroys one of the great levels of nastiness in the novel: Homer is just as much as an opportunist as Faye, and he deserves everything he gets. Why is he being so generous, letting her stay with him and hold cock-fights in his garage? Because he's a pathetic, incapable human being who barely has a human feature to him: he's just a collection of nervous ticks. He lusts after her, and he seems to delight in his thwarted lust. He's got less going for him than that lizard on the cactus, eating flies.

The film suffers from an attempt to make the characters likeable, almost without exception. The only person who escapes this "Hollywood-ization" of the book is Adore, the horrible child star whose fate nobody who has seen the movie (or read the book) will ever forget. Jeez!

If you find yourself watching this movie and "just not getting it," do yourself a favour and read the book. It won't make the movie any clearer, but you can at least view the movie as a clear-cut example of the sort of thing the book was pointing out and railing against, way back in 1939 when this idea was still a novel one: Hollywood films are manipulative and full of fakery, and so are humans in general, and people in general are also ghoulish and horrible, and no amount of eyelash-fluttering or smooth tango-dancing will disguise that. You might be the owner of a big studio and have an inflatable dead horse in your pool, but you still can't relate to your wife, and the only thing left in your life is pathetic thrill-seeking (cock-fights, cheesy stag flicks).

(Incidentally, I'm amazed at how many quirky things ended up in the screenplay that WEREN'T part of the book! Kudos to the scriptwriter for that at least!)

Can you believe that back in the dark ages of the 1970s, UK fleapits would run double bills like Chinatown/Day of the Locust? Two of the finest films of the 70s in a single sitting was quite an experience. I've never forgotten either movie. I've seen Chinatown on TV a couple of times, but The Day of the Locust is still vividly imprinted in my mind from 1975. It's one of the most harrowing visions of the rancid side of the American dream ever committed to celluloid. A real masterpiece of design, script, ensemble playing, cinematography and direction. Humanity at its most despicable and malignantly deranged has rarely been captured as majestically as this.

Every now and then a true gem pops out of the past... that is, if you are a keen cinema-goer (or movie-viewer...as, nowadays, only kids go to the movies). The day of The Locust is what John Schlesinger had up his sleeve after the huge success of 'Midnight Cowboy'. It was his 'pot shot' at Hollywood. It was his Guy Fawkes beneath Parliament. It was his warning that the Twin Towers story COULD just be a sordid masquerade...although, of course, he didn't know it yet. They say that Hawthorne's book is far more engrossing. Sure... books take up ten times more time to unravel. His characters are mean-spirited, calculating, 'cold fish'...and what they get is what they deserve. But I feel Schlesinger and his script-writers made a worthwhile effort to imbue even these squirming serpents and cold-blooded insects with a breath of pathos, and humanity. And rightly so... the story GAINS points. 'Locust' sometimes feels more like Bergman, Fassbinder or (even) Fellini than like an American film. It reminds us of Grosz. Of German decadence between world wars. We are, often sub-consciously, led down grim corridors of analogy.... Nazi hysteria... Hollywood Boulevard madness. We are voyeurs... we watch a giant Dream Machine which spawns future mutants... frustrated maniacs. And literally DEVOURS its pathetic 'extras' and hopefuls. That is why the overtones of the film seem ,somehow, biblical. David Lynch's source-material is suddenly openly revealed. THIS MOVIE! We have Twin Peaks themes and characters... Mulholand Drive, even more so... Blue Velvet...and so on... But hey! Let's be fair.... anyone who has ever REALLY known Hollywood can only nod and say..."Yes...It's all true.... And if I'm still here, in the industry,.... I'm either a hypocrite, a victim, or a pervert of sorts." ALL the characters are crazed atoms of the American Dream Factory. And Schlesinger opts for a finale worthy of another British, but surprisingly hot-bloodedly so, director... Ken Russell. Madness on the rampage. But is he only a fine line away from exaggeration? Is he not symbolically 'spot on'? That's for you to decide. Meanwhile, the film has done the job it came to do. Maybe even better than 'Chinatown'. And, believe me, the HEY DAY of Hollywood may seem far away and long ago... but the manic drive and sexual black-mail we observe in this reptilian display is all too contemporary to our time. Bon Apetit! (If your digestive system is up to it).

A period piece that navel-gazing Hollywood needed to make to instill a sense of history into what it does, the illustrations of complex ideas that come across in a novel are often flat and forced together in this wandering epic. But style emerges victorious, as the sense of exact replication of mid-30s Los Angeles overwhelms one (especially if you have spent time in Southern California's older neighborhoods, such as Los Feliz). I dare say that Billy Barty is at his thespian finest and almost steals the show, but Karen Black never had greater breadth of making a shallow callow character as sympathetic. And this might be the only film that make you feel pity on a character enacted by Donald Sutherland. Burgess Meredith is better here than in his ROCKY roles, and halfway thru the film I blurted out - about the lead actor - it is the dude from GHOSTBUSTERS who had the beard.

And the final scene is terrifying after a lazy walk thru two hours of yesteryear dawdling.

Based on Nathanael West's equally Hollywood-Gothic novel, "The Day of the Locust" revolves around the lives of several Los Angelenos: Tod, a Yale art graduate working on a painting; Faye, an aspiring and out-of-touch actress, and her ostentatious father; and Homer, a sexually-repressed outcast. The film charts each of the characters' aspirations that come crashing into one of the most apocalyptic and ghastly endings in film history.

I had read West's novel years ago before finally seeing this film, and it's evident that director John Schlesinger took heavy cues from the source material. This adaptation stays true to the novel, only making minor alterations where it has to cut its losses. It's dark, wacky, grotesque, and at times flat-out disturbing, and there is a strange dreaminess to the film that recalls the novel's borderline-absurdist approach to the material.

There is a phenomenal attention to detail here and sophisticated cinematography, capturing the hazy underworld of Hollywood that houses its rejects and wannabes. The film's greatest asset is, inarguably, its stellar cast. William Atherton plays the leery painter with conviction, while Donald Sutherland captures the eccentricity and quirks of Homer. In the novel, West draws all the characters to the tipping point of caricatures, and Karen Black perhaps best embodies this as Faye, the starry-eyed and artless aspiring actress- Black evokes the childlike sensibility of the character with a purposeful sexuality that is what makes her character in particular so disturbed. Burgess Meredith (also Black's co-star in "Burnt Offerings") is appropriately hammy as her gimmicky showman of a father. Geraldine Page makes a brief but grandiose appearance.

The oft-discussed ending is worthy of the talk it is the subject of; it is one of the most well-shot and harrowing conclusions in film history, edging on the apocalyptic and the orgiastic, much like the source material. While typically discussed as a drama, I consider "The Day of the Locust" to be a horror film just as I consider the novel to be a horror novel- unconventional, albeit, but the film captures something wildly grotesque that challenges its audience, and some may find it a work difficult to locate merit in. There is a terrifying nucleus to this story that trumps its less-horrific finishings.

All in all, "The Day of the Locust" is a classic and important film; like its source novel, it serves us with a grim portrait of society that is not exclusive to Hollywood, but is perhaps best exemplified in the city of stolen water and stolen dreams. Barring "Mulholland Drive," which came over two decades later (and was undoubtedly influenced by Schlesinger's film), "The Day of the Locust" remains the greatest fictional representation of Hollywood ever, and perhaps the most horrifying film to lay claim to Los Angeles. 10/10.

This was the dullest experience in my entire life. The actors do a good job with their characterizations but I couldn't summon the effort to actually care about any of them and the story moves so slowly it is hard to even stay awake by the climax it is too much to late. Even if you love these actors go see one of their better films one that couples action, humor, dialogue, or at least great visuals with decent acting.

This is a film that I am not certain how to address, but feel compelled to do so anyway. In the heat of the moment, that moment being only a few after having completed viewing this astonishing small epic. My head is literally reeling, my stomach is in knots and my chest feels corseted with stress. I've watched a lot of horrific, anxious, violent films, but none compared to the sheer, cumulative visceral force of this film, which builds and builds and builds, ending in a crescendo of such sickening force I can barely articulate it. I thought `Midnight Cowboy' was a potent flick, but Schlesinger really outdid himself with this one. The cast is all uniformly excellent, alternately despicable as well as sympathetic (all have their moments where they vie for who is most abject, revolting, debauched, pitiable), but none are lovable. Waldo Salt's script is first-rate. All in all, excellent, but it will be a long time before I want to sit through it again. Rewarding, but damn hard. The human race really is the most fascinating and repulsive of all.

I haven't read the novel that this is based upon, but I would like to. Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to be trapped in front of a car crash just about to happen, with no means of preventing it? That's what this is. You see the people, the situations, and you want to crawl through the screen and stop them. This movie hurts. At no point did this make me smile, or inspire any hope. I see another reviewer has called it nihilistic, and I agree. Is this a failure on the film's part? I don't think so. It's what it set out to be. On principle and as a personal test of strength, I try to never look away from what I'm watching, unless it's visually disgusting(not the case here). Yet this often had me avert my eyes. Not in response to the presentation, which is excellent, but the content. It is rather unpleasant. Set during the Great Depression, this shows us several youths in California, with dreams of making it big. What happens is that Hollywood chews them up and spits them out, and proceeds to walk out the door like it was nothing. This could also be argued to be somewhat about materialism. While I realize that this is not the only famous picture about this, it is the only I have seen, as far as I can remember. We see intolerable, superficial celebrities(not to mention wanna-be's) and those that suck up to them. The climax is extremely visceral, and I'm not sure when I was last that gripped and affected by, well, anything. Atherton is Tod, who wants to make it in the art department. Sutherland is Homer Simpson(no relation), an incredibly pitiful, lonely middle-aged man. And Black is miscast as Faye, the object of the males' desire. She nails the obnoxious, unrealistic and spoiled aspects, and I can't complain about her empty, glassy-eyed stare. Where she comes up short is that she isn't sensual or sexy. Yes, she is meant to have been mangled by the city as well; however, we don't find her attractive or alluring, and it harms the overall result. The acting is great. These characters are not likable; they are interesting enough, and I wasn't bored following them. I've heard others describe this as excessively long... I suppose cutting it down could help it. The dialog is well-written. This is sardonic and darkly comical in tone. There is a lot of disturbing content, some brutal violence and blood, and a little sexuality in this. The DVD comes with no extras. I recommend this to those that this sounds appealing to. 7/10

With THE DAY OF THE LOCUST, director John Schlesinger and screenwriter Waldo Salt get credit for even attempting to bring Nathaniel West's scalding novel to the screen. It's a noble failure that nonetheless has a lot going for it. The cast --- or more concisely, the CASTING ---is stellar. Karen Black, in a rare lead, plays a Hollywood extra who lives in a world of delusion along side her grifter father Burgess Meredith. Both have seldom been better. Schlesinger gets the most out of their off-beat personas. As Tod, West's hapless observer, William Atherton is perfect --- he has just the right lack of personality! The rest of the odd cast includes Billy Barty as a very ornery dwarf, Jackie Earle Haley as a would-be child star, and, as the doomed Homer Simpson, Donald Sutherland. Geraldine Page has a highly unnecessary cameo as an Aimee Semple McPherson type evangelist. It's all very ugly but it's immensely watchable. With great cinematography by Conrad Hall.