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

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.

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The Day of the Locust (1975)
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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.



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.