THE DAY OF THE LOCUST 1975 lecinemadreams.blogspot.com/2009/07/the-day-of-locust-1975.html
"It's hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous." Nathanael West The Day of the Locust America is a country that believes in dreams. We're encouraged to follow our dreams; we're induced to dream big; we're promised that if we believe in our dreams enough, then they most certainly will come true. But of course, not all dreams come true. The Day of the Locust is a dark vision of losers on the fringe of Hollywood, a city built on dreams. The question the film posits is: what happens to dreamers when they realize their dreams have betrayed them? During the mid 70s, America was in the throes of a nostalgia craze that swept up all of pop culture (from fashion to music) in an idealized preoccupation with the 1930's. Perhaps this is why, when John Schlesinger's epic, multimillion dollar adaptation of Nathanael West's sour indictment of the Hollywood dream-machine (and, in turn, America's willingness...even need... to be duped by its promises) hit the screens, audiences responded as if they had been kicked in the stomach. After the soft-focus 30s kitsch of The Great Gatsby (1974), I guess no one was ready for a glamorous, all-star, nostalgia horror film.
Karen Black as Faye Greener
1/10
Donald Sutherland as Homer Simpson (yes, I know...)
William Atherton as Tod Hackett
Burgess Meredith as Harry Greener
2/10
Geraldine Page as Big Sister
As a story of the lost and lonely lured to California by the promise of an unattainable dream, The Day of the Locust, written in 1939, is as relevant as ever. Take a look at the faces of the so-called journalists and paparazzi behind TMZ and you'll see exactly the kind of predatory bitterness and resentment West wrote about seventy years ago.
The Day of the Locust is one of my all-time favorite films and I admire it immensely, yet I readily admit that watching it is not entirely an enjoyable experience. I remember back in 1975 when my family and I saw the movie at a theater in San Francisco (on a double-bill with Nashville, no less), the climactic riot scene brought my sister to a state of heaving sobs, and during the cockfight sequence someone behind me exclaimed, "This is worse than 'The Exorcist'!" It is an amazing, sometimes breathtaking, film, but it's no walk in the park. WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM Its visual style. It's a nightmare vision of Hollywood that looks like a dream.
3/10
The San Bernardino Arms, where many of the film's characters reside
Frank Lloyd Wright's landmark Ennis House, built in 1924
4/10
"We were looking at the pool and somebody, Jerry Appis, I think, said it needed a dead horse on the bottom, so Alice got one. Don't you think it looks cute?"
Interior of the Wright house: Glamorous, cold, empty
PERFORMANCES: Karen Black has publicly expressed her lack of fondness for this film, but I suspect this has more to do with the wellpublicized behind-the-scenes tensions than for her performance in it. While clearly a controversial choice for the siren that leads men to their destruction, I find it to be one of the finest performances of her career.
As the vain and shallow temptress who thinks her theatrical pretensions are evidence of talent, Black achieves moments of genuine pathos.
5/10
Comical if she were not so pathetic, Faye Greener can't distinguish false posturing from real feelings. The Simpsons may have forever dampened whatever poignancy the name Homer Simpson ever held, but Donald Sutherland is such a heartbreaking marvel in this film that, were it a more widely seen movie, his repressed and lumbering Homer would be the one eclipsing the cartoon doofus. In a film of so many spectacular, full-scale setpieces, one of the most powerful moments is a simple scene of Sutherland sitting in his sun-baked garden, eyes heavy-lidded with sadness.
He is the picture of loneliness and idle longing, his nervous, tension-filled hands betraying a repressed frustration. And when the camera moves in for a close up, the light barely catching a tear falling down his cheek...
6/10
...the effect is devastating.
THE STUFF OF FANTASY: I really love how they use faces in this movie. Fellini-esque in the way the people are captured in tableaus of desperation and unidentifiable hunger. It's like getting a celebrity-eye-view of what fans must look like.
7/10
Watching, looking, and voyeurism is a running motif in The Day of the Locust. Everyone seems to be looking outward for something they lack within. THE STUFF OF DREAMS: Was there ever a sequence as grotesquely surreal as the apocalyptic "The Burning of Los Angeles" riot scene that caps this movie? At this point in the film, things have reached such a tense and tortured pitch (there seem to be two or three different climaxes) that not only are the film's protagonists all keyed-up, but so are we. As a Hollywood premiere erupts into a mad mob scene, we in the audience may find ourselves feeling the cathartic release of violence without even knowing it. It is one of the most compellingly visual sequences ever captured on film.
The banal rendered nightmarish
8/10
9/10
Horror has a face The Day of the Locust: burnt offerings and a human sacrifice Hollywood rarely gets it right when it turns its lens upon itself, but The Day of the Locust is, for me, one of the finest films about Hollywood ever made. As one who loves film for its ability to feed our dreams, I appreciate how The Day of the Locust explores the potentially destructive, ultimately empty allure of the dreams Hollywood packages and sells to us. Copyright Š Ken Anderson
10/10