The Day Of The Locust (1975)

An art director in the 1930's falls in love and attempts to make a young woman an actress despite Hollywood who wants nothing to do with her because of her problems with an estranged man and her alcoholic father.

Director: John Schlesinger
Cast: Donald Sutherland, Karen Black, Burgess Meredith, William Atherton, Geraldine Page, Richard Dysart, Bo Hopkins, Pepe Serna, Lelia Goldoni, Billy Barty, Jackie Earle Haley, Gloria LeRoy, Jane Hoffman, Norman Leavitt, Madge Kennedy, Ina Gould, Florence Lake, Margaret Willey, John War Eagle, Natalie Schafer, Gloria Stroock, Nita Talbot, Nicholas Cortland, Alvin Childress, Byron Paul, Virginia Baker, Roger Price, Angela Greene, Robert O. Ragland, Abbey Greshler

Many critics consider The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West to be the best novel ever written about Hollywood. John Schlesinger, director of superb dramatic cinema with a slightly surreal edge in throughout the sixties and seventies was the perfect choice to direct. Initially overlooked upon it's release in 1975 (to mixed reviews), it has since developed a huge cult following.

Giving a cynical and gothic look at Hollywood during the late 1930s, Day of the Locust tells the tales of residents of the dilapidated San Bernardino Arms: Faye Greener, a trashy aspiring actress with limited talent, and her father Harry, a washed-up vaudevillian reduced to working as a door-to-door salesman; sexually repressed accountant Homer Simpson, who desperately loves Faye, and East Coast WASP Tod Hackett, an aspiring artist employed by the production department of a major studio, who also fancies Faye.

Unusual and bizarrely disturbing images: a middle-aged man sits in an untended garden staring at a large lizard that stares back; a young woman is transported into the film she's watching and finds herself portraying a harem girl in old Baghdad; a dwarf tenderly caresses a rooster, bleeding and dazed from a cock-fight,and then tosses it back into the ring to its death; an androgynous child beckons to a man through a window and performs a grotesque imitation of Mae West.

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