The Day of the Locust
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 acoholic father.
- Director: John Schlesinger
- Genre:Drama / Thriller
- Runtime:138 minutes
Cast
Donald Sutherland: Homer Simpson
Karen Black : Faye Greener
Burgess Meredith: Harry Greener
William Atherton: Tod Hackett
Geraldine Page : Big Sister
The film offers a cynical look at Hollywood during the late 1930s and tells the tales of several of the residents of the dilapidated San Bernardino Arms: Faye Greener, a trashy aspiring actress with limited talent, and her father Harry, a former vaudevillian working as a door-to-door salesman; sexually repressed accountant Homer Simpson, who desperately loves and is fanatically devoted to Faye; and East Coast WASP Tod Hackett, an aspiring artist employed by the production department of a major studio, who also fancies Faye. It is filled with unusual and often bizarrely disturbing images: a middle-aged man sits in an untended garden staring at a large lizard that stares back at him; a young woman is transported into the film she’s watching and finds herself portraying a harem girl in old Baghdad; a dwarf strokes a rooster, bleeding and dazed from a cock-fight, then tosses it back into the ring to its death; an androgynous child standing on the sidewalk beckons to a man through a window and performs a grotesque imitation of Mae West once his attention has been caught. These brief vignettes do little to advance the basic plot, but they serve to comment on the sleaziness of Hollywood and its varied inhabitants. Spectacle fills the screen – a set of the Waterloo battlefield collapses on the extras during the making of the film within the film, and in the film’s climax, a world premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theater evolves into a horrific riot culminating in gruesome tragedy. Read more
