Feature

You Ain't Seen Me, Right? – The Day of the Locust (1975)

Daniel

29th April 2011

Like an exasperated teacher catching a pupil doodling rude drawings in an exercise book, our regular feature, You Ain't Seen Me, Right?, casts a disapproving eye over your LOVEFiLM list and sternly suggests that you should be applying yourself more instead of wasting your time with rubbish like Little Fockers.

You Ain't Seen Me, Right? is brought to you by Daniel Palmer, of Part-Time Infidel web fame. He’s the only person in the world that can provide a winning argument for the existence of Jar Jar Binks – but he just doesn’t want to.

The Day of the Locust (1975)
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The Day of the Locust

John Schlesinger’s career is a story of unwavering bravery and diversity. A leading light of the British New Wave, he made some of the movement’s most bold and iconic offerings - A Kind of Loving (1962); Billy Liar (1963); Darling (1965) - before Hollywood came calling. But his transition to Tinsel Town did nothing to temper his adventurism. He continued to innovate and challenge audience perceptions, making Midnight Cowboy (1969) - the first and only X-rated film to win the Best Picture Oscar - Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) and Marathon Man (1976). The Day of the Locust is somewhat lost in this august company, a fact not helped by its lukewarm critical reception and lacklustre commercial performance.

In this faithful adaptation of Nathanael West’s classic novel, based on his experiences writing B-movies, Tod Hackett (William Atherton) is a Yale graduate and aspiring artist who takes a job in the production department of a movie studio. He moves into a dilapidated apartment complex peopled with a variety of eccentrics and hopefuls; amongst them Faye (Karen Black), an extra and aspiring starlet, and her father, Harry (Burgess Meredith), a washed-up clown turned door-to-door peddler. Spurning Tod’s romantic advances, Faye enters into a ‘business arrangement’ with Homer (Donald Sutherland), a mild-mannered, pious accountant who indulges her every material whim.

Featuring the nonchalant zombie of Charlie Chaplin.


The above synopsis fails to convey the full complexity of The Day of the Locust; what it lacks in narrative propulsion it more than makes up for with stinging satire and striking imagery. The film is a sensory feast; Conrad Hall’s sparkling cinematography lending a golden tint to the Art Deco opulence of Richard Macdonald’s production design; Schlesinger’s camerawork soaring majestically over proceedings, and John Barry’s score redolent of this heightened glamour. Metaphor abounds throughout; from the rose that Tod inserts into a crack in the wall of his apartment, to the set that collapses while shooting a battle scene, to the cockfight that Tod attends, to the disturbing dénouement.

Atherton subtly traces the gradual erosion of Tod’s credulity, while 70s ‘it’ girl Black is a perfect fit for the acquisitive social climber. Meredith - best known as the Penguin in the original Batman series and Rocky Balboa’s trainer - infuses Harry with the tragedy of every performer whose hopes have been crushed. Sutherland delivers the film’s standout performance as the awkward, unassuming dupe; his unique features articulating the torment and struggle occurring beneath Homer’s banal exterior - a fact emphasised by the frequent use of shots that draw attention to his hands.

Waldo Salt’s take on West’s prophetic work lambasts the hubris and narcissism of celebrity culture - outlined in the scene where Faye storms out of a film because her scene has been cut short, as a newsreel on the rise of Nazi Germany plays in the background - and the tendency to defer to the will of the mob. The film accurately portrays the decadent pre-Production Code era, and the profligacy of those “grown men making mud pies to sell to the great unwashed” who built the industry.
Folks, you just got film-critiqued. More from You Ain't Seen Me, Right? next week.

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