Imprint released this film some time ago, but here are my complaints about John Schlesinger's
The Day of the Locust. I've done my best to make this a pleasant reading experience, which I hope it is, as I have almost nothing good to say about this preposterous film
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This film is so flipping terrible, you expect bugs to start crawling out of the screen while you're watching it. Waldo Salt's screenplay is a joke, taking Nathanael West's....distinguished....novel and turning it into....into what, exactly? For whom is he betraying West's vision? Intellectuals, middlebrow awards bait, the mass audience--I honestly don't know how this film could please a soul, but to a degree, it seems to have made out alright with all three groups. The material is made boring, rhythmless, obvious, toothless, laughable, and more than anything, pathetic. This is not even a dull respectable Hollywood (Hollyweird, amirite?) adaptation on the order of
Cabaret or
Deliverance or
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but something a lot worse, absurd rather than objectionable, but totally terrible anyway. It really does feel like neither director nor writer had any remotely clear or compelling idea of what they wanted to do in making this film, what the ideas and justifications were behind their decisions and changes, etc. The changes and additions Salt and Schlesinger make, like having their camera, trained on some forsaken plebians sitting and staring on a sidewalk bench, reveal one less miserable pleb with each passing car (which is totally inane and not even physically possible), or references to Nazis and Hitler, or an especially gross, and abysmally staged, sequence with Geraldine Page as a fake preacher, not only coarsen and miss the point of whatever material on West's book that relates to them, but generally seem to have no discernible or worthwhile point to contribute or coherent logic on which to operate of their own. It just seems like they were trying to make a really dumbed-down nasty American Dream nightmare movie and obvious and cheap, cheeeeeaaap satire to cash in with the disillusioned Watergate audience that had shelled out big bucks for the tacky, sleazy, ridiculous film travesty of
The Great Gatsby the year before. It's seedy business, this
Day of the Locust For (and By, and About) Idiots.
The acting is, with the exceptions of William Atherton as Tod (too perky as well as too pretty for his role, but still crisp and intelligent), Burgess Meredith's Harry Greener (especially brilliant), and Billy Barty as the dwarf Abe Kusich (finely controlled), completely ridiculous down to the bit players. Strangely and kind of hilariously, poor Karen Black seems to often take total blame (and a Golden Globe too!) for this project's failure, as if the entire film wasn't decomposing all around her, but she
is so bad here that I was genuinely worried, 40 years later, for her mental health. Sometimes she looks like a crazed prisoner, casting her eyes around the various sets to determine which would be best to sprint towards, quickly climb over, and make her escape. Lacking is any sense of control or psychological continuity--she's so all over the place it's a little appalling, to the point where often the torment of her character seems to actually blend with her, Karen Black's, inexplicable torment about....something. Honestly she's so off the rails it's kind of upsetting, as well as greatly puzzling as to any possible cause of her bizarre behavior. However, unlike other KB perfs I've seen that I would call "bad", where she is just disengaged, I saw her emanate a lot of raw histrionic material and effort that with some actual, you know, modulation and smart ideas from the director, could well be made into quite a compelling Faye Greener. Donald Sutherland and Jackie Earle Haley, on the other hand, seem quite uninhibitedly happy to oblige their tasteless director with two of the most soulless, graceless, stupid performances I've ever seen from any well-established actor, old or young. They bring no intelligent life or any kind of good creative energy to their characters--as the transvestite movie brat Adore Loomis, Haley just flails his limbs around and makes cacophonous noises, while Sutherland playing Homer Simpson struck me as a talentless non-entity (not all the time, just in this film) clumsily trying to play a talentless non-entity, which sure doesn't work! Sutherland gives an inane, loitering, weird, sweaty, ineffably objectionable and stinky performance that makes an indulgent hole in the movie's already almost unrelievedly stupid canvas. He seems to strain incompetently after mysterious understated histrionic effects like a man trying to thread a needle with a brick. Homer is a tiresome, insufferable idiot of a character, and Sutherland certainly makes an idiot of himself. Another example: I remember a particularly atmospheric early scene, where some Hollywood muck-a-muck, i assume a casting director, is picking people out of a group, and as he points to his choices, says, "You, you, YOU, YOU!", with a crescendo, in a very inappropriately loud, stupid, dorky voice, and is also IIRC excessively greasy--a Schlesinger "house" performance. It really does seem like the makers of this film actually
went out of their way to make it as dumb and ridiculous as possible! Schlesinger spends practically his whole career having a tantrum about American, well, everything, and making facile and cheap fun of American tastelessness, and he also makes this film the way he does, with this screenplay! Haha, it's so absurd! He wasted too much of his life doing that, instead of building on his true strength, which is a powerful and even penetrating feeling for everyday human relationships--a quality which may actually be present, in one or two tiny, tiny moments, even in this dire film.
If Conrad L. Hall's cinematography was a woman's makeup, it would have been applied during an earthquake, with mascara on her forehead and lipstick all over her face. It's all gauzy and slimy, with bungled, clownish, sloppy framing and hapless, puzzling lighting effects, instead of the venomously precise, controlled, tight and unlyrical, but beautiful in their own right and highly evocative, visuals that would best match West's prose style--a perhaps harder and drier version of a Hitchcock shot in one of his color films (minus his camera slanting and tilting) is maybe the closest equivalent to West's literary mise-en-scene I can think of--or maybe one of Bunuel's last films. Seriously, it's the most ridiculous camerawork I've ever seen in my life! 2nd place: Douglas Slocombe's wretched work on the Clayton
The Great Gatsby from the year before. The sets were designed by one of the greatest production designers in film, Richard Macdonald, and the staging is so shitty you can't even tell.
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