I don’t know if audiences of the 1970’s were clamoring for films set four decades prior, but the studios delivered a ton of them. Paramount, especially, seemed to have a hard-on for making films set in the 1930’s, among them Paper Moon, Lady Sings the Blues and The Last Tycoon. Well, it worked with Chinatown, so I can understand wanting to see if that mine might yield any more gold.
1975’s Day of the Locust would not be such a film, seemingly as predestined to fail as its miserable characters. This adaptation of the Nathanael West novel is as nihilistic as They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, though it didn’t pack as strong of a punch for me. Like that film, it will culminate in a devastating climax which feels inevitable. With that in mind, this essay will concern the entire film, so I’ll warn you now: there will be a great many spoilers.
It has been long enough since I read West’s novel that I can’t say how closely this hews to the source material. It is certain the film adds more material, just by it being a 2 ½ hour adaptation of a rather slim text.
What I remember most vividly from the book is how it rambled. It is far more a character study than a plot-oriented work. If there is one central character, it is that played by Karen Black as a vapid, aspiring star who, at best, occasionally gets work as an extra.
She and her father (Burgess Meredith) occupy an apartment in the same complex as William Atherton, playing a Yale-educated artist employed as an art director at Paramount. Their flirtation is equally shallow on both sides: he likes her looks and she is always looking to worm her way into a film. This is her idea of letting him down gently: “I could only let a really rich man love me. I could only love someone criminally handsome.”
Black’s role is interesting because the character deliberately doesn’t have any depth. She has no backstory and there is no reason for us to root for her to succeed. That isn’t bad writing, but a deliberate and brave choice. Her dream is to be a movie star, but it is like even she doesn’t have any particular why she has chosen to do this. Near the end of the runtime, she tells Atherton he just doesn’t understand her, but we don’t, either.
Also involved with Black is Donald Sutherland as a character named Homer Simpson. Curiously, he doesn’t enter the film until nearly an hour in, and that is when Meredith, peddling a kind of snake oil door-to-door, collapses in his living room. When Black arrives to take her father home, the shy and awkward Sutherland is instantly smitten. She will move in with him following the death of her father, and they will have a sexless relationship based on security and him buying her everything she wants.
Also at the apartment complex is Billy Barty as a repellent character I couldn’t quite get a read on. He drinks a lot and is always looking to screw. Following the death of Meredith, he proclaims, “I’m gonna go get laid…for Harry!” An honorary lay—that’s a kind of tribute I was not aware of previously. This role is different from anything I have seen him do before, as I never expected to hear the actor casually drop the n-word.
The remaining residents of note in the complex is a mother who is forever grooming her nightmare offspring to be a child star. I thought the brat was a girl, and was surprised it was Jackie Earle Haley in a curly blond wig, shorts and frilly socks. This monster is forever tap-dancing from one place to another, snarling and spewing pure venom. He especially seems to have it in for Sutherland’s timid accountant, pushing him until the man stomps the boy to death in the street. It is a testament to Sutherland’s performance that I can understand why he does this.
Haley’s shtick of sarcastically singing and crudely parodying celebrities (we first see him imitating Mae West) is similar to Meredith’s performance. The older man is a former vaudevillian furious to be reduced to selling crap. I mentioned how the film rambles, and weirdest tangent is an extended bit where we follow him on his rounds. His desperate need to play the clown fails to mask his seething hatred. I also detected the faintest suggestion of incest in his relationship with his daughter, but I suspect I am reading too much into that. Honestly, it is hard to guess how much evil a man is capable of once you’ve seen him doing his old shtick, but attired and wearing make up giving him the appearance of the world’s oldest Droog.
Sex hangs in the air throughout this picture, yet there is nothing titillating. Atherton, at the invitation of a producer (Richard Dysart), goes to a brothel (ran by Natalie Schafer–Lovey Howell from Gilligan’s Island!) where he joins in watching a stag film with a bunch of older, wealthy people. It seemed about as awkward as I imagine it would be. While there, he sees Black’s best friend (Lelia Goldoni) working as “entertainment”. It is inevitable Black will eventually follow her into this line of work.
It seems neither Atherton nor Sutherland ever get to make time with Black, as she is too preoccupied in that regard with a couple of rough guys played by Bo Hopkins and Pepe Serna. I think a telling metaphor is both guys have cockfighting roosters, whereas Atherton is an art director and Sutherland is an accountant. Black will eventually move these two into Sutherland’s garage “until they can get back on their feet”. One night, the accountant becomes a peeping tom at his own house as he watches in horror from outside a window as these two, Black and almost everybody else in the movie, proceed to trash his place.
The film is big on scenes of destruction, as if no aspect of Hollywood can keep from imploding. Earlier, there was an amazing scene on the set of the film Atherton is working, where the set collapses. That the film he is working on is about Napoleon’s battle at Waterloo seems to foretell even the movie within this movie cannot succeed. This sequence is spectacular, starting with an actor or two falling through the floor, culminating with entire sections falling a couple of stories. A nice touch is famed director/producer William Castle playing the director of this fiasco, in what was his final appearance on screen.
But these scenes have nothing on the violent riot that is the film’s climax. Sutherland had killed Haley within a block of a red carpet movie premiere in progress, and the mob that was there to stargaze ends up tearing him apart. From there, cars are overturned, shop windows are smashed, and things are suggested that I am glad we don’t have to see in details. Atherton, in the midst of the chaos, imagines faces in the mob turning into what look like crude, featureless black-and-white illustrations. This was so similar to what Alan Parker did in the “Another Brick In The Wall” sequence of The Wall that I wondered if this was an influence on him.
Hollywood has always secretly loved films that take its own livelihood to task. But this film isn’t like similar, earlier efforts such as 1952’s The Bad and the Beautiful. Day of the Locust is genuinely hostile, and that’s why industry veterans such as Sidney Lumet called out director John Schlesinger for “shitting where he eats.” It is a weird, sprawling beast of the kind the major studios would stop taking risks on by the end of the 70’s. In a way, its messiness conveys the insanity and instability of the lives of its characters. It is a vortex of cruelty that has to destroy Sutherland, a normally gentle man who must be pushed to his breaking point. To do otherwise, or to make a tidier film, would be a betrayal.
Dir: John Schlesinger
Starring (in the order I believe they should be billed): Karen Black, William Atherton, Donald Sutherland
Watched on Arrow Films blu-ray