Alicia I love this movie so much

Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

Sexyloutak Absolutely the worst movie.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

kijii Based on one of Nathanael West's five short novels, this movie portrays and attacks Hollywood of the late 30s, just as the Nashville, released the same year, satirized Nashville. Although there have been many satires about the movie industry, none is quite as acerbic as this one.Set in a Southwestern adobe apartment complex, the San Bernardino Arms, we see an assortment of Hollywood hopefuls, has beens, and want-to-bes as well as some hucksters and con men. The story is viewed through the eyes of Tod Hackett (William Atherton), a talented Yale sketch artist and set designer who actually does get a Hollywood job in his chosen field. Faye Greener (Karen Black) is there as an extra and dreams of making it big someday. She lives with her father, Harry Greener (Burgess Meredith), a washed up vaudevillian clown who goes from neighborhood to neighborhood, selling bottles of elixir, using his old vaudeville routine as a sales pitch.Adore (Jackie Earle Haley) is the brat child actor with the stereotypical stage mother. Another REALLY obnoxious character is Abe Kusich (Billy Barty), a dwarf bookie who takes advantage of his difference, knowing that no one can really fight back—I've personally known people like this who use their apparent disadvantages to their own obnoxious advantage. (Both Adore and Abe fit into this category. I mean, who can lash out against a child or a dwarf?) Homer Simpson (Donald Sutherland) also belongs to this strange group of Hollywood misfits. He is really the ultimate outsider. He is a strange repressed accountant from the Midwest, who really wants to be loved for who he is. After Harry Greener's death, Faye, uses Homer---for his money and slavish love —as long as his unrequited worship of her remains intact.Most of the men love Faye and want her as their girlfriend or lover. She almost drives Tod crazy, since he tries to get her to love him, but she says something like 'I don't love you that way.' When he asks her why she would have sex for money, she screams 'That's different!! They are STRANGERS!!!' The asexual Homer is different too: He just loves to be around her and cook for her. "Big Sister (Geraldine Page)—who could have been based on Aimee Semple McPherson—is the woman evangelist begging for money in exchange for promises of everlasting live, health, and happiness is Hollywood's religion, 'the false, utopian theology California is famous for." I'm not sure what the symbolism is behind the movie's constant motif of cockfighting. It could represent male sexual competition (cock fighting) or it could be the need for voyeuristic nihilism so prevalent in Hollywood. The final scene of the movie is very long. (And I think it is way overdone.) It starts with a Hollywood premier of Cecil B. DeMille's The Buccaneer (1938)and ends in chaos, death, and destruction. The movie is mostly filmed through a yellow lens, suggesting 'sunny' Southern California.

Mr_Ectoplasma Based on Nathanael West's equally Hollywood-Gothic novel, "The Day of the Locust" revolves around the lives of several Los Angelenos: Tod, a Yale art graduate working on a painting; Faye, an aspiring and out-of-touch actress, and her ostentatious father; and Homer, a sexually-repressed outcast. The film charts each of the characters' aspirations that come crashing into one of the most apocalyptic and ghastly endings in film history.I had read West's novel years ago before finally seeing this film, and it's evident that director John Schlesinger took heavy cues from the source material. This adaptation stays true to the novel, only making minor alterations where it has to cut its losses. It's dark, wacky, grotesque, and at times flat-out disturbing, and there is a strange dreaminess to the film that recalls the novel's borderline-absurdist approach to the material. There is a phenomenal attention to detail here and sophisticated cinematography, capturing the hazy underworld of Hollywood that houses its rejects and wannabes. The film's greatest asset is, inarguably, its stellar cast. William Atherton plays the leery painter with conviction, while Donald Sutherland captures the eccentricity and quirks of Homer. In the novel, West draws all the characters to the tipping point of caricatures, and Karen Black perhaps best embodies this as Faye, the starry-eyed and artless aspiring actress— Black evokes the childlike sensibility of the character with a purposeful sexuality that is what makes her character in particular so disturbed. Burgess Meredith (also Black's co-star in "Burnt Offerings") is appropriately hammy as her gimmicky showman of a father. Geraldine Page makes a brief but grandiose appearance.The oft-discussed ending is worthy of the talk it is the subject of; it is one of the most well-shot and harrowing conclusions in film history, edging on the apocalyptic and the orgiastic, much like the source material. While typically discussed as a drama, I consider "The Day of the Locust" to be a horror film just as I consider the novel to be a horror novel— unconventional, albeit, but the film captures something wildly grotesque that challenges its audience, and some may find it a difficult a film to find merit in. There is a terrifying nucleus to this story that trumps its less-horrific finishings. All in all, "The Day of the Locust" is a classic and important film; like its source novel, it serves us with a grim portrait of society that is not exclusive to Hollywood, but is perhaps best exemplified in the city of stolen water and stolen dreams. Barring "Mulholland Drive," which came over two decades later (and was undoubtedly influenced by Schlesinger's film), "The Day of the Locust" remains the greatest fictional representation of Hollywood ever, and perhaps the most horrifying film to lay claim to Los Angeles. 10/10.

sol1218 ***SPOILERS*** Based on Nathanael West's 1939 short story "Day of the Locust" the film lives up to all it's hype even though it was hardly a smashing box office success back in 1975 when it was released. The movie starts out with young Harvard educated Tom Hackett, William Atherton, trying to get a job at a big Hollywood studio as one of its graphic and art designers. Living at the San Bernardino Arms Tom runs into a bunch of people who are also looking to make it big in Tinsel Town but keep running into dead ends. It's there where Tom meets aspiring actress Faye Greener, Karen Black, who's trying to break into the movies in her feeling that the grass is greener on the other side, Tensile Town, then where she's now living.Tom in fact does get himself a good paying and prestigious job at Paramount Studios as a graphic designer but is somehow stuck on the part time actress, who's lucky to get cameo roles in the movies, Faye Greener who for some reason doesn't take advantage of Tom's position in getting her better roles. Faye as it turns out is into wild partying with the rough crowd that includes a number of Mexican cock fight enthusiasts which turns the very genteel and sensitive Tom off. In fact Tom himself gets corrupted by Faye's lifestyle in losing himself when he gets drunk and high on pot before a cock fight that gets him so horny and heated up that he almost ends up raping her.There's also Faye's father the washed up vaudevillian song & dance man Harry Greener,Burgess Meredith,who's really pushing his luck, and weak heart, as a door to door snake oil salesman who what seems like hasn't made a single sale during the entire duration he's in the movie. As Harry's luck and heart starts to run out Faye in desperation tries to get him back to health by going to see faith healer Big Moma or Sister, Geraldine Page, at one of her sermons. This in fact does help Harry out a bit but before you know it his heart gives out from all the excitement and he dies halfway through the film.The person who really steals the acting honors as well as the hearts of all of us watching the film is that sad eyed and repressed, in life love and everything else, dufus the homely and knuckle crunching Homer Simpson, Donald Southerland. Homer a transplanted Mid-Westerners has moved to the Sunshine State to live out his last years in peace and quite without expecting much excitement in doing that. it's when Homer runs into Faye who seems to have some feelings for him that his sad & sorry life starts to lighten up a bit. Faye just takes advantage of the sad sack by leading him on in that she's in love with him where at the same time is having it on with almost every man, except Homer & Tom, in the vicinity between San Bernardino to Beverly Hills.The end comes when a very naive and heart sick Homer finds out that his live in companion Faye, who has no sexual relation with him at all, has been cheating and making a complete and total fool of him which causes Homer to have an emotional breakdown. This causes a heart broken Homer to pack up and head for who knows where who then runs into the bratty 12 year old Adore Loomis, Jackie Earl Haley, who's been unmercifully teasing the poor guy since the movie started. It's when Adore pushed the wrong button, by striking him in the head with a rock, that Homer finally lost it and that set the stage for the movies fairy climax. That all happened at the grand primer and opening of Cecil B. DeMill's latest multi million dollar spectacular cinema epic "The Buccaneer". By the time that the movie "Day of the Locust" was finally over it wasn't "The Buccaneer" that everyone remembered but the riot that Adore sparked which in fact ended up burning down all of Tinsel Town!The 144 minute movie kept your interest with a number of weird sub-plots and strange characters thrown into it but that was nothing compared to it's final ten or so minutes when the earth, or Hollywood, caught fire in one of the most shocking and realistic disaster scenes,in what's not considered a disaster movie, in all of motion picture history! And that's without even the used of computer enhanced technology! Director John Schesinger staged the final riot scene much like the real life, and death, notorious April 9th 1948 "Bogotazo" that in a 24 hour period lead to the deaths and injuries of between 3,000 to 5,000 people and burned downtown Bogata Columbia to the ground.

Roger Burke I saw this movie, at a cinema, when it was released. I came away from it, horrified and subdued. Now, thirty-five years later, my assessment hasn't change: this is one of the most horrific stories ever to hit the screen and, in my opinion, vies with Mulholland Drive (2001) as the definitive statement about Hollywood - the Dream Factory as someone once said.What makes this story all the more horrible is that some of the fictional characters were based upon real people. Hence, one can only speculate the extent to which some events have a basis in fact.The story, published in 1939 from the mind of Nathanael West (ex-Hollywood screen writer), pulls no punches about the trials of Faye Greener (Karen Black, in her finest role, as a green-horn actress) to claw her way into the glitzy world of Hollywood, showing in vivid detail how would-be stars – both sexes – prostitute themselves, literally and figuratively, in their bids for stardom. In sum, the story is about how people sell themselves, and not only in the business of making movies. To that extent, it's also a modern metaphor for all the stories about how all of humanity sells itself to the devil of money everyday, in order to survive.The difference with the rest of humanity, of course, is that we can keep our sins private.So into this mix of horror enters naïve Tod Hackett (William Atherton) as an aspiring art director to a Hollywood mogul. He lives in the same apartment block as Faye and is smitten; but he makes no headway, because she's on the make for somebody to make her a star. So Tod – arguably West's alter ego for the story – is reduced to being an observer to all that transpires between Faye and all those she encounters. One of whom is Homer Simpson (Donald Sutherland), a mild-mannered bachelor and accountant who just likes to mind his own business; in today's psychological parlance, he'd be labeled as extreme passive-aggressive personality type. So, like Tod, he's also bowled over one day when he meets Faye through his association with Faye's father, Harry Greener (Burgess Meredith, in his finest role), a has-been vaudevillian who does old tricks as he goes about as a door-to-salesman, in the Hollywood hills, a pathetic caricature of what all actors must do to survive.And, like the passing parade that begins the story, the viewer, with Tod, goes on to meet a succession of unsavory dead beats, in high and low society, who pull and push at poor Faye to do their bidding, all with the promise of rich dreams and dreams of riches. Faye is a lost soul, however, devoured by desires she can't stop or ignore: but she can do what it takes – she can hack it. But can Tod? Well, yes and no, as the viewer learns.For my money, the most unsavory of all characters, and stunningly played, is the child actor Adore (Jack Earle Haley) who continually torments Homer at and near his home, and who meets Homer for the last time at a back street, off Vine, where a Hollywood premier opening is, ironically, the last major scene in this movie. Anybody who sees this movie will forever remember that scene between Homer and Adore. Not to be forgotten also is Adore's utterly obnoxious and evil mother, played by Gloria LeRoy (I think).But it is the transformation of Homer in that back street – infatuated with Faye and tormented by his inhibitions laid bare by a child – that is, without doubt, one of the finest pieces of acting ever. Why Donald Sutherland didn't get even a nomination is beyond belief.(As an aside, I can't help wondering whether the developers of the long-running TV cartoon of The Simpsons used the name Homer Simpson as some kind of back-handed reference to Locust.) The mise en scene, photography and soundtrack are exemplary. The direction by Schlesinger is so astute, it's invisible to this viewer. And the script faithfully follows the story to the last line of the novel; the only significant exception is the omission of the back story about Homer, before he came to Hollywood.Has much changed in Hollywood since 1939? Has human nature changed? Whatever your opinion, do see also Mulholland Drive (2001), David Lynch's take on the same basic story: young girl wants to be in pictures and gets what she wants – or does she?If Locust sucks you in, Drive will swallow you whole into an even worse nightmare. Both movies have my highest recommendation. Enjoy.