Metacritic-Rezensionen

Day Of The Locust exudes authenticity, from the costuming to the cars, from the exotic clothes to the marcelled hair styles.

Magnificent production, combined with excellent casting and direction, make The Day of the Locust as fine a film (in a professional sense) as the basic material lets it be. Nathanael West's novel about losers on the Hollywood fringe has lost little of its verisimilitude in adaptation.

The movie finally becomes just an exercise, then: a brilliant one at times, and with a wealth of sharp-edged performances, but without people for its things to happen to.

Schlesinger's adaptation of Nathaniel West's classic novella, the Hollywood of the 1930s is decidedly as ruinous for its denizens as the Hollywood of the 1970s. [28 Jul 2000]

Exquisitely painful look at how Hollywood turns its hopefuls into whores. [03 May 1992, p.B35]

There's vivid period atmosphere and similarly vibrant performances from a cast headed by Karen Black and Donald Sutherland. [24 Mar 1985, p.5]

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.

A tale of the losers and chancers rattling around Hollywood's fringe, the film fatally lacks the black humour and nightmarish edge of Nathanael West's source novel. But there are some good elements swarming through the muddle, not least the performances from Karen Black as a lowly starlet and Donald Sutherland as the emotional wreck who falls under her spell.

A painfully misconceived reduction and simplification by writer Waldo Salt and director John Schlesinger of the great Nathanael West novel about Hollywood in the late 30s.

Admittedly the book, an elusive, mesmeric work of associated images and ideas, surreal and analytical, would present problems for the most talented of film-makers. But Schlesinger really blows it.