The Day of the Locust (1975)

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Directed by John Schlesinger.

Starring William Atherton, Geraldine Page, Donald Sutherland, Karen Black, Burgess Meredith.

The Day of the Locust is anything but a cheerful, light look at Hollywood in the '30s. It recreates both the town as well as the filmmaking world around which much of the town revolved with devastating accuracy. The movie tells the twin tales of talentless wannabe actress Faye Greener (Karen Black) and Homer Simpson (Donald Sutherland), a lovelorn accountant who couldn't care less about movies. Around this framework, a huge and intricate social network is tellingly revealed, until the film's gruesome and tragic ending. Not for those who prefer to hang onto their illusions about the glory days of Hollywood, The Day of the Locust, based on the novel by Nathanael West, is a must-see for serious film buffs. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

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True Confessions
by HairyLime in HairyLime Blog

liked it.

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"I'm a big fan of James Ellroy and especially 'The Black Dahlia', but was horribly disappointed in the recent film version by Brian DePalma. I had heard that the film 'True Confessions' also dealt with a 'Black Dahlia'-ish murder as a backdrop and when it appeared on the tube last night, I took a look. A big admirer of both Robert Duvall and Robert DeNiro, and this cast had a lot of meat on the bones including Charles Durning, Burgess Meredith, Kenneth MacMillan among others - but something about it just left me flat, even at the scene where the murder site is discovered (which one would think could be milked for suspense or chills, or... well, or something) is given the same matter-of-fact treatment as the scene where a couple brothers sit down at a local diner to eat a piece of pie. The corruption in the church storyline was as dull as paint, and DeNiro plays it all so subtly that he nearly puts us to sleep. The only life in the film is provided by R ... " [More]

Review by All Movie Guide

All Movie Guide

is neutral about it.

Scripted by Waldo Salt from Nathaniel West's scalding 1930s Hollywood novel, John Schlesinger's lavish adaptation of The Day of the Locust (1975) is a wrenching, if imperfect, indictment of America's Tinseltown mindset. Recreating Golden Age Hollywood with seedy realism and film fantasy artificiality, Schlesinger and Salt punctuate the downward spiral of William Atherton's aspiring art director, Karen Black's talentless actress, and Donald Sutherland's wealthy rube with flashes of the decadent beauty, self-delusion, and killer ambition that render the film industry an irresistible snake pit. Though the characters played by Atherton and Sutherland remain frustratingly underdeveloped, the surreal climactic riot that engulfs them is a genuinely horrifying confluence of mob hysteria and visceral bloodshed that unstintingly reveals the depths of media culture insanity. A box-office disappointment that earned only mixed reviews, The Day of the Locust nonetheless garnered Oscar nominations for Conrad Hall's mistily golden cinematography and Burgess Meredith's bravura performance as a broken-down vaudevillian-turned-huckster. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

Tags: actor , celebrity , filmmaker , loser , showbusiness
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