KAMAD Throwback Thursdays 1975: The Day of the Locust

Throwback Thursday #TBT

Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy.

Day of the Locust

Well it turns out there was a reason I never rushed to see this film when it came out in 1975. "The Day of the Locust" is a dour, black hearted takedown of the Hollywood Dream and by association the American Dream. It is showered in technical excellence in performances, production design and cinematography, but it is also lathered up by the most vile version of failed movie people you are likely to see this side of "Babylon". At least this film avoids the elephant shit. 

One of the reasons I never followed up on the film is that I could never get a sense of what it was about. Maybe I missed the trailers because the one above is pretty direct in saying it is the underside of Hollywood that we are going to see. Look, I know that there was a dark side to the Golden Age, there are always flip sides to any story. It's just there there is almost no one that you care about in the story, so whatever tragic outcome shows up will probably be met with indifference. Donald Sutherland is listed as the first lead in the movie and he does not appear for three quarters of an hour into what we see on screen. Meanwhile, we are introduced to a strange relationship that never takes on the quality it needs to make us want to know more about the two figures who are really at the center of the picture. William Atherton may have the most sympathetic role of his career here. He is notoriously the obnoxious prick in 80s comedies and action films. Maybe he is more sympathetic as a terrorist on the Hindenburg than here, because his character literally tries to rape a woman, and then apologize for it. So Drunken Rapist or murderer against the Nazi Airship, which one is the most appealing character? This was probably his biggest role and he is very good in it, but again, it is hard to feel sorry for people who are so obliviously self destructive. 

Karen Black, is the star of the film, playing Faye Greener, an aspiring actress who is struggling to get extra work, and lives with her aging vaudeville performer father played by Burgess Meredith. Faye is a character who seems like she could be appealing to start with, but she rapidly is revealed as a potential gold-digger,  and she certainly is aware of the effect she has on the men around her. She is self centered and leads Atherton's character as well as Sutherland and Bo Hopkins and Pepe Serna on for most of the movie. She is mercurial and insecure and thoughtless to the men in her life. You almost sympathize with Atherton's Tod when he does assault her. Maybe we could have more sympathy when she is forced to resort to prostitution, except she is such a bitch to everyone around her that it seems like maybe she has found her real niche.

Fecklessness thy name is Homer Simpson. Not the cartoon character, but the Sutherland role in the film. As a lonely man, maybe a cloistered homosexual, he has difficulty relating to others and when Faye latches on to him, it's like watching a cat play with a mouse. The incongruity of their relationship and her continued connection to Tod is simply befuddling. No one is getting what they want from any of the connections they are forming. Everyone feels like an object of pity. Little Person actor Billy Barty is aggressively confrontational in what is likely to be the biggest role of his career, and Burgess Meredith pushes the pity button but also is cloyingly cliched. 

Director  John Schlesinger has mounted a admirable visualization of old Hollywood, finding the homes in the hills to shoot scenes at, constructing moments of behind the camera elements for the work being done at a studio, and working with Cinematographer Conrad Hall, to produce a soft focus view of the corruption we are seeing on the screen. The work earned him a well deserved Academy Award nomination. Schlesinger's collaborator on previous films, Editor Jim Clark, probably needed to find a way to make the story flow a little faster, although his work on the two best scenes in the film is excellent. 

Those scenes that will remain with me, as the highlights of this movie, include an on set disaster during the making of a Napoleonic War film, and the extremely disturbing climax of the picture. Novelist Nathaniel West, on whose book this movie is based, clearly was down on the American dream and his nightmarish vision of the culture is embodied in the climax of the film where a character murders a child, is subsequently murdered by a mob, all of this taking place at the site of the most lavish of images from the 1930 depression era, a Hollywood Movie Premiere. The satire and cynicism in the two scenes is not subtle, but both sequences are staged very effectively and I think would justify a viewing of this film, if you can put up with the dark side of the Golden Age of Hollywood. 

[I watched this on a cropped laserdisc version, not the ideal aspect ratio]