Le Jour du fléau

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

If you were lucky enough to see this astonishing film in 1975 you like I, will have never forgotten the deco Hollywood horror of DAY OF THE LOCUST, nor the queasy performances, perfectly realised.

Also at the time in cinema release on other films was one of the best movie trailers ever made. The trailer was imagery put to the song "Isn't it romantic" alerting moviegoers to a brilliantly bitter experience ahead. My friends and I rushed to the cinema the week it opened and were not disappointed. Other comments here give far too much of the story away and some hilariously 'don't get it' but let me say that of you ever want to see a cross between CABARET and WHATS THE MATTER WITH HELEN and BABY JANE and other powerhouse exercises in delusion, this is your film. The quality of the whole production, especially the art direction and the photography is the very best......and the music soundtrack is one to find...old Lps still exist and are well worth finding , as is the tape. I welcome the DVD release of this awesome film . A genuine knockout.

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.

I don't quite understand the comments from the viewers who found this film boring. I've been lucky enough to see it on the big screen several times at revival houses, and each time I was blown away. Day of the Locust is a dark, compelling, amusing, bitter epic that's really more about America itself as filtered through the lens of Hollywood at its first creative height, in the 1930s.

What makes the movie, beyond the writing and direction, is its cast, and many of the supporting actors here create indelible characters. Why Karen Black didn't remain a superstar after this decade is a mystery, especially after this film -- in which she proves that she could act the hell out of a role. And how can you not like a film in which Billy Barty plays a foul-mouthed alcoholic (the first character we meet in the book), Burgess Meredith is a hapless door-to-door salesman, Natalie "Lovey" Shafer is the madam of a high-class whorehouse in San Bernardino, and Donald Sutherland is the repressed Homer ("No Relation") Simpson, an accountant who's so alienated from his own feelings that he's reduced to howling in despair in his own garden. And, in fact, Sutherland's character is involved in one of the film's most harrowing moments, which features a young Jackie Earle Haley as a promising child star of indeterminate gender but infinite obnoxiousness.

Anyway, if you have a chance to catch this film on the big screen, by all means do so, and be sure to add the DVD to your collection -- although, since we're coming up on the 30th anniversary, it's just possible that Paramount Home Video might decide to give it the deluxe treatment it deserves. Frankenheimer, et al, manage to take a brilliant novella by Nathaniel West and turn it into an amazing piece of cinema that will stick with you long after the lights go up. And, as an added bonus, you can just enjoy it as a great story, or delve deeply into the symbolism. This is the kind of film that works both ways, and one that you cannot miss if you consider yourself any kind of film fan at all, at all.

I finished watching this movie half an hour ago and I am still trembling, my heart still pounding. I am a great admirer of John Schlesinger and he has been one of my favorite directors since I saw Midnight Cowboy. But this just beats it all. It is the most horrifying movie I have ever seen. I am normally not a sympathizer with human characters in movies, but the end made me CRINGE. Donald Sutherland was perfect for his role and Karen Black made me feel such hate for her. There is nothing I would change in this movie. It is perfect, and beautiful, and hit with such force that I would probably never see it again, but I will remember every detail.