The Day of the Locust (film)
| The Day of the Locust | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | John Schlesinger |
| Produced by | Jerome Hellman |
| Screenplay by | Waldo Salt |
| Based on |
The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West |
| Starring | |
| Music by | John Barry |
| Cinematography | Conrad L. Hall |
| Edited by | Jim Clark |
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Production
company |
Long Road Productions
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| Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
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Release date
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Running time
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144 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $17,793,000 |
The Day of the Locust is a 1975 American drama film directed by John Schlesinger, and starring William Atherton, Karen Black, Donald Sutherland, and Geraldine Page. The screenplay by Waldo Salt is based on the 1939 novel of the same title by Nathanael West. Set in Hollywood, California just prior to World War II, it depicts the alienation and desperation of a disparate group of individuals whose dreams of success have failed to come true.
In his review in The New York Times, Vincent Canby called it "less a conventional film than it is a gargantuan panorama, a spectacle that illustrates West's dispassionate prose with a fidelity to detail more often found in a gimcracky Biblical epic than in something that so relentlessly ridicules American civilization... The movie is far from subtle, but it doesn't matter. It seems that much more material was shot than could be easily fitted into the movie, even at 144 minutes... It is reality projected as fantasy. Its grossness — its bigger-than-life quality — is so much a part of its style (and what West was writing about) that one respects the extravagances, the almost lunatic scale on which Mr. Schlesinger has filmed its key sequences."
Jay Cocks of Time said, "The Day of the Locust looks puffy and overdrawn, sounds shrill because it is made with a combination of self-loathing and tenuous moral superiority. This is a movie turned out by the sort of mentality that West was mocking. Salt's adaptation... misses what is most crucial: West's tone of level rage and tilted compassion, his ability to make human even the most grotesque mockery."
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Wikipedia