Sara Batkie
The ’70s saw no shortage of tales about Los Angeles eating its own. The first half of the decade alone saw the release of such variously acrid visions as Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, Frank Perry’s adaptation of Play It As It Lays, and Roman Polanski’s immortal Chinatown. Perhaps that’s why by the time John Schlesinger’s The Day of the Locust appeared in 1975, it wasn’t a commercial or critical success; maybe, at least for contemporary viewers, it was a case of too much too late. Jay Cocks of Time called it “puffy and overdrawn.” In his review for the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum decried it as “painfully misconceived.” But time has been kind to the extravagant grotesqueries of Schlesinger’s nightmarish depiction of Hollywood in decay. Released fifty years ago this week, The Day of the Locust looks more and more prescient with each passing day.
Much of its nastiness comes directly from the source material: a 1939 novella by Nathanael West, adapted by screenwriter Waldo Salt, who previously worked with Schlesinger on Midnight Cowboy. It would probably take less time to read the book than watch the film, which clocks in at two hours and twenty-five minutes, but the expansiveness that Salt brings to the screen version does little to cushion its bile. West based The Day of the Locust on his own time as a contract scriptwriter for Columbia Pictures in the early thirties, spending much of the period in financial difficulty, living in a hotel on Hollywood Boulevard that inspired the apartment building where his characters congregate. He died young in a car crash in 1940. His work remained obscure until the late ‘50s when it was republished by New Directions and found a more receptive audience.
West maintained a firm belief throughout his life that the American Dream had been hopelessly corrupted materially and spiritually, and that viewpoint seeps into Schlesinger’s film. Their Los Angeles is a place where nothing is sacred. Nights out in the hills include stag films and cockfights. Huckster preachers bloviate in front of flashing neon crosses. Rabid fans bombard celebrities at funerals. It’s a “mecca of broken dreams,” as a tour guide boasts, particularly for the denizens of the San Bernardino Arms who all have the air of not realizing a party has ended. There’s the ornery dwarf Abe (Billy Barty) and precocious tap dancer Adore (a very young and very irritating Jackie Earle Haley). There’s one-time clown and current down-on-his-heel peddler Harry Greener (Burgess Meredith), along with his daughter Faye (Karen Black), who works as an extra but yearns for stardom. And there’s new arrival Tod Hackett (William Atherton), who’s been hired as a set painter but mostly sits around the lot waiting for assignments and doesn’t see the earthquake-induced crack in his wall for the omen it is.
In essence, this is a hang-out film about people who’ve been hung out to dry. Despite where Locust takes place, very little screen time is devoted to being on set; when it is, Schlesinger makes sure to highlight the artifice of the endeavor. Where others may not be able to resist the period’s old Hollywood glamor, Conrad Hall’s woozy, Vaseline-smeared cinematography emphasizes the era’s seediness rather than masking it. The portents of disaster are inescapable, even before the reveal that Tod is working on a film about Waterloo. When he courts Faye, they drive by other, wealthier people’s houses, locked out of the lives they dream of leading. Meanwhile, the constant whir of the sprinklers in the courtyard lawn sound like the titular insect and Hitler’s on the newsreels.
Inevitably an innocent stumbles into this viper’s nest, in the form of a man named, yes, Homer Simpson (Donald Sutherland, who looks so uncannily like Tobey Maguire here that I have to think Damien Chazelle had him in mind when he cast the latter in Babylon.) As played by Sutherland, he’s all wide eyes and soft manners with a roiling inner turmoil just below the surface. Homer might be a lonely, sexually repressed accountant but he has the money to give Faye what she desires, and it’s not long before she’s leeching off his naivete. He’s the sole character who’s capable of seeing things for what they are, which makes him a figure of mockery and disdain for the others. Still, it’s his purity that provides whatever semblance of a heartbeat Locust has. “Oh, Lord,” he cries at one low point, “forgive me for harboring such unworthy thoughts, but sometimes I wish I could tear it all down!”
His wish comes true in one of the most startling and lurid set pieces to come out of the 70’s. Like the novella, the film climaxes with a premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, where the crowd’s enthusiasm quickly curdles into an apocalyptic riot. Earlier Tod told a studio head that he “concentrated on the faces” in his production paintings, and Schlesinger’s camera mimics that concentration to a horrific degree, trapping both the major characters and the audience in a crush of surreally screaming faces and senseless violence, like a Francis Bacon painting come to life. It’s an incredibly bold way to end the story, one made all the more combative by its complete lack of ambiguity. Perhaps that’s why viewers in 1975 flinched from it, but fifty years on there’s something cathartic about its conviction. A fire is a destructive force—but it can be cleansing, too.
“Day of the Locust” is available for digital rental or purchase, and is out on Blu-ray from Arrow Video.
