By John Schlesinger, 1975.
Starring William Atherton, Billy Barty, Karen Black, Richard A. Dysart, Bo Hopkins, Burgess Meredith, Geraldine Page, Pepe Serna, Donald Sutherland.
Rating: 5/10, 5.5/10.
Nathanael West’s novel The Day of the Locust seems to be, and I could be wrong about this, but it seems to be a classic lost in the changing of the generations. To members of my parents’ generation, it’s one of The Great Novels, a member of the canon. It’s thought of as the Hollywood novel, and often as the Californian or even American novel. Among my generation, very few seem to have heard of it. Which, I think, is not a great tragedy. I’ve read the book (for a class, admittedly), and didn’t think much of it. It seemed horribly dated, juvenile, and unnecessary. Not actually bad; as a matter of fact I did think it was a well-written book with a number of interesting bits, but I was overall thoroughly unimpressed.
I was still, however, quite curious to see the movie, if only to see how they dealt with the apocalyptic climax. The fact that Burgess Meredith, Donald Sutherland, and Karen Black were in it also helped that curiosity. As it turns out, I should have just fast-forwarded to the climax.
The vast majority of the movie is utterly unremarkable, save for good performances from Meredith and Sutherland (not from Black, sadly). It’s bland, and boring, but not actually bad. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it, but I wouldn’t say to go out of your way to avoid it, either. As far as I could tell, it followed the book fairly well, but only nominally. As in, most of the same things happened, but it didn’t seem that they happened for the same reasons and the feeling didn’t transfer directly from the book to the movie. Which would be fine in most cases.
Here, though, it just doesn’t make sense, because then comes that apocalyptic finale, and not only do the events not make sense in light of what we’ve seen in the movie, the visual style itself makes no sense—but would, if the emotional and motivational arc of the movie had followed that of the book. The ending, taken either by itself or in terms of the novel, is emphatically great. Virtuoso, I might even say. It reminded me favorably of Eisenstein’s massacre on the Odessa steps from The Battleship Potemkin. And all of the skeletal faces and burning telephone poles and cars and people running and everything was wonderfully expressionist. But if you take this sequence in terms, not of itself or of the book, but of the movie which preceeds it, it’s a ludicrous waste of time that storywise makes little sense and visually is just plain old dumb.
So here’s the bottom line. This movie is not good. Not at all, really. But, if you’re interested in seeing the end of the novel movie-ized, or if you’re interested in great expressionist filmmaking, rent the video and fastforward to the end. Otherwise, it’s just a waste of time.
nb. The picture above is in black and white, but the movie is in color.