The Day of the Locust

The Day of the Locust is a 1975 film adaptation of Nathanael West's 1939 novel of the same name. West, whose social pessimism John Schlesinger shares in the film, uses a biblical metaphor, that of the plague of locusts with which God sought to punish the Egyptian pharaoh who refused to free the Jews, to give the title to a novel in which, based on assumptions that are much more moral than political, he seeks to denounce an atmosphere of decadence, of permanent failure to meet expectations, of Hollywood as a great machine producing frustrated dreams and growing nightmares. Schlesinger seems to have respected the book's catastrophic intent to the letter, especially having chosen an award-winning screenwriter like Waldo Salt, who had been a friend of West's during the few years that he too had worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood, before a car accident ended his life in 1940, a year after the book's publication.

Although West and Schlesinger were both Jewish, one American and the other British, the years of the rise of fascism, anti-Semitic persecution, and the outbreak of World War II in Europe play no visible role in the narrative. Schlesinger chose to introduce two references to Nazism through very brief newsreel footage, which is not followed up in any way. It would be interesting to look for a political interpretation of how, in the mid-1970s, in the midst of the US defeat in Vietnam and while the Watergate scandal forced Nixon's resignation, Schlesinger adapted a 1939 novel that somehow sought to insinuate that post-Depression illusions could lead to an explosion of violence, which, in West's book, however, could have nothing to do with the world war that had not yet begun. It would be interesting, but it's difficult. The film is much more about the “Mecca of broken dreams” as Hollywood is described by a tour guide early in the narrative; or, as Lee Gambin described it in 2016, “the dark corners of an industry that devours its product, vomits it up, and devours it again,” thus producing “an extraordinary critique of human ugliness and desolation.”

As is often the case in 1970s cinema, violence frequently takes over the film, as if it had an intrinsic logic. The painting “The Burning of Los Angeles,” which in the novel is painted by the main character, Tod Hackett (magnificently portrayed by William Atherton, then 27, two years before starring opposite Diane Keaton in Looking for Mr. Goodbar), is replaced in the film by the illustrations he prepares for a production about the Battle of Waterloo. It is revealing that Schlesinger resorted to Goya's motifs (drawing inspiration from “The Third of May 1808” and “The Disasters of War”) to show Hackett's sketches. The increasing harassment that Faye Greener (Karen Black) suffers, at different times, from various male characters, the extraordinary violence of cockfighting, filmed in all its excess and without concessions, especially the long, merciless, unrestrained final orgy of violence, reveal the mark of an era (the 1960s and 70s) lived in the US under the sign of violence and the perception of its banality. It is in a paroxysmal tone that the unsurpassed Geraldine Page takes on, in religious ecstasy, the character of a Pentecostal preacher, Big Sister, inspired by a real character, the Canadian Aimee Semple McPherson, herself a pioneer in the use of mass media for the dissemination of the most Hollywood-esque forms of religious staging and exhibition.

Less connected to the narrative is the character (Homer Simpson) played by the always brilliant but unsettling Donald Sutherland, then at his most creative, just before his collaborations with Bertolucci (1900, 1976) and Fellini (Casanova, 1976). Sutherland's Homer Simpson (a name that would inspire Matt Groening to create the character of the same name in the animated series The Simpsons) is one of his most disturbing characters, but he seems to fulfill a catalytic function in the narrative rather than playing a specific role in its central theme: contempt for the insensitivity and banality of desire, the horror of the crowd capable of all excesses. The novel and the film curiously share a common historical characteristic: they did not enjoy immediate commercial success and waited decades to become reference works, not only of the work of each of the authors, but of the American fictional and cinematic universes. And yet, both West and Schlesinger were already successful authors when the book was published and the film premiered. Schlesinger had been one of the most successful directors of the British New Wave of the 1960s, with works as interesting and original as Billy Liar (1963), Darling (1965), both starring Julie Christie, and Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971). In the US, he triumphed in 1969 with Midnight Cowboy, which won him Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture.