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Films & Filming review
THE DAY OF THE LOCUST
- Directed by John Schlesinger. Produced by Jerome Hellman. Screenplay
by Waldo Salt from the novel of the same name by Nathanael West.
- Director of photography, Conrad Hall.
- Editor, Jim dark.
- Music, John Barry. Plus many tunes of the 1930s.
- Production designer, Richard MacDonald.
- A Paramount production, distributed by CIC. American.
- Technicolor. Cert X. 143 mins.
- Faye, KAREN BLACK;
- Tod, WILLIAM ATHERTON:
- Homer, DONALD SUTHERLAND;
- Harry, BURGESS MEREDITH;
- Big Sister, GERALDINE PAGE,
- Claude Estee, RICHARD A DYSART;
- Earle Shoop, BO HOPKINS;
- Miguel, PEPE SERNA;
- Mary Dove, LEILA GOLDONI;
- Abe, BILLY BARTY;
- Adore, JACKIE HALEY;
- Mrs Loomis, GLORIA Le ROY;
- Lee sisters, INA GOULD, FLORENCE LAKE;
- Audrey, NATALIE SCHAFER;
- Alice Estee, GLORIA STROOCK;
- Joan, NITA TALBOT;
- Blue movie protectionist, MICHOLAS CORTLAND;
- Butler, ALVIN CHILDRESS;
- Helverston, PAUL STEWART;
- Director, WILLIAM C CASTLE.
GORDON GOW
The essential point about The Day of the Locust is powerfully
expressed in its climax, which John Schlesinger has filmed in
magisterial style. It is a climax that shows the violence bred
by frustration, disappointment and boredom, those three deadly factors
known in some measure to all of us. The leading characters in the
film have more than their share. Homer (Donald Sutherland)
suffers from poor health and also from a somewhat retarded personality.
Under stress, almost instinctively, he sparks off the awesome spectacle
of mass riot. It happens in the streets outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre,
where crowds have gathered to ogle the stars arriving for the premier
of Cecil B DeMille's The Buccaneer. The year is 1938. At a slight
distance from the throng, Homer is sitting on a bench, silently enduring
an emotional crisis. In this condition he is abruptly taunted by Adore
Loomis (Jackie Haley), a precocious mother-ridden Hollywood brat. When
Homer fails to respond. Adore throws a stone at him, grazing his forehead.
This unleashes his fury. He kills the child, very brutally. And this individual
act of violence escalates, in a terrifying way. The crowd panics, and
at the same time it virtually exults in a display of multiple brutality,
curiously related to lust.
Eventually, faces become masks: images have sprung alive from the paintings
of Tod (William Atherton). Nathanael West (from whose novel of 1939 the
film is adapted) described the owners of these faces as people who had
gone to California for their health but had turned sour, finding little
comfort in the sunshine and the oranges. From their disenchantment sprang
a bitterness which has its outlet in lethal action. The point is well
made. The effect is both cautionary and cathartic. Bounded by a scream
of outrage from Homer and a mighty cry of anguish from Tod, this sequence
must surely take an important place in film history. It is magnificently
done.
The film is otherwise variable, keeping fairly closely to West's novel
but with occasional little changes that I find hard to understand: why,
for example, is the life-size model of a dead horse in a swimming pool
so white and lyrical, when in West's original concept, and to underline
a spiritual malaise, it was 'a heavy, black mass'?; and why is there an
emphasis here on the 'ugliness' of clients visited by an expensive clutch
of prostitutes, whereas one gathered from the novel that these occasions
were very agreeable for all participants?
It would be churlish to suggest that the hate-filled faces glimpsed periodically
around Los Angeles, prefiguring the ultimate mob, are more dramatic in
their impact than the central figures. But sometimes it does seem like
that. Not because of the actors, who are good, but probably on account
of a tendency to protract. This is most evident in the characterisation
of Harry, the ex-clown gone to seed, a figure by whom Schlesinger would
seem to have become so fascinated that he dwells upon him with a heaviness
only just alleviated by Burgess Meredith's performance, and he is of course
incapable of being un-interesting.
Harry's daughter Faye is given a striking interpretation by Karen Black.
Her task is difficult, because she must indicate a surface artificially
composed, the archetypal Hollywood blonde, while at the same time persuading
us that this girl has a considerable depth of feeling, and indeed of sensitivity.
She looks remarkable, whether back-lit and golden-haloed as she intones,
'I could only let a rich man love me: I could only love someone criminally
handsome', or having a sweaty binge by a campfire where the crowing of
fighting cocks is a ready symbol for rape. Schlesinger echoes her ridiculous,
delightful persona by filling the soundtrack with songs of the era: 'Isn't
It Romantic?' when she takes a car ride, 'Everything's In Rhythm With
My Heart' when Homer provides her with cornflakes and strawberries in
bed, 'Dancing On A Dime' as she does her best to give the sad slob the
kind of sex he wants but scarcely knows how to take, and 'Easy To Remember
But So Hard To Forget' when she dances with Tod in a nightclub.
The parched aspect of life, for which the dreams woven in the studios
must compensate if possible, is observed with Schlesinger's known ability
plus occasional heightenings that are not unworthy of comparison with
Fellini: the masks in the mob serve best in this regard; but the Fellini
strain might also be detected in a faith healing sequence, which I thought
expendable really, despite the presiding presence of Geraldine Page -
it is like an exercise in style, okay in itself but prolonging a film
that is of a slightly dangerous duration for such a subject as disillusion.
Many touches are fine, however: the succinct hints from a newsreel and
a radio that the Second World War is looming; the autograph hunters who
linger at a cemetery in case a star should happen to attend a funeral;
the extensions of the major theme in demonstrable moments of deflating
truth, as when a transvestite entertainer removes his wig, or when a Hollywood
army storms a hill which collapses under the weight. But again, as with
the horse in the pool, one is surprised by the intrusion of grace upon
an image that West made dark: when Homer gazes at a lizard, the reptile
is viewed poetically instead of exuding an ugly menace - right afterwards,
though, one of the hating faces is brought into focus and the ominous
element is restored.
West's experience as a screenplay writer in Hollywood gave a realistic
base to his study of the deglamorised inhabitants. His social awareness
lent strength to his vision of the wild resentment that flares when hope
is gone. The film watches this often enough. It is arguably, and in spite
of my specified reservations about bits of it, the most consequential
of Schlesinger's works to date. |
