The 8th Plague

By JAY COCKS

THE DAY OF THE LOCUST

Directed by JOHN SCHLESINGER Screenplay by WALDO SALT

Hollywood making a movie out of The Day of the Locust is like the Lilliputians mounting a production of Gulliver's Travels. The scale is off; the distance is wrong.

Nathanael West's cool, cruelly funny novel, first published in 1939, has become a classic vision of the heart of Southern California. West, who did some screenwriting himself, knew the raw fringes of the movie world. He saw the kind of anxiety that led people to Los Angeles and the gaudy madness that was nurtured there. He used Los Angeles, and particularly the tawdry glamour of Hollywood, as a perfect metaphor for the screaming end of many poor dreams of glory. West wrote with fury, but without rancor or condescension. "It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible the results are," runs the novel's most famous passage. "But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous." By that standard, John Schlesinger's film is nothing less than a tragedy.

Synthetic Desperation. Schlesinger and Screenwriter Waldo Salt collaborated previously on Midnight Cowboy, and The Day of the Locust has much the same mood of sentimental surrealism. Both films treat rather bizarre subjects in a comfortably slick fashion, so that nothing becomes very real or threatening. All decadence is decorative, all desperation synthetic. 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 follows West's novel closely in most of the plot details. It misses what is most crucial: West's tone of level rage and tilted compassion, his ability to make human even the most grotesque mockery. The novel, a series of interrelated sketches, does not have the strong narrative that lends itself best to film adaptation. So this movie has trouble finding a focus. The protagonist is Tod Hackett (William Atherton), an aspiring artist who works in the production department of a major studio. Hackett also nourishes a private vision of cataclysm, which he wants to get on canvas and call The Burning of Los Angeles. It is good to know this in advance, for although Schlesinger shows Hackett making sketches and studying faces, it is never clear just what he is working on. The film, like the book, ends with a riot at a movie premiere. Before Hackett's eyes, the scene becomes the painting. Since we do not know much about the painting, or about its meaning to Hackett, this tends to make the whole climax superfluous.

Hints of Crisis. In fairness, Schlesinger seems to be after something else. All through the movie he has inserted references to the coming crisis in Europe: headlines in the newspapers and newsreels of Hitler tell of war. But such hints are not especially well integrated; their necessity is questionable--until the premiere, when Schlesinger turns the riot into World War II.

The event is skillfully and elaborately staged, but wildly overwrought. The announcer at the premiere is made up to look like Hitler, and his excitement drives the crowd to greater excesses of violence. It moves like a marauding army. Not only are people trampled and windows broken, but fires start, telephone poles fall, and Hollywood Boulevard seems to shake. West's modest riot was more effective than Schlesinger's whole set piece. But this silly cameo of World War II is perfectly in order for a movie so far out of control.

The personal dramas in The Day of the Locust are so sour and abject that one understands why Schlesinger ended the film with such a desperate flourish. All the characters from the book are here: Homer Simpson (Donald Sutherland in a fine performance), the boggled Midwesterner whose hands, West said, "had a life of their own"; Harry Greener (Burgess Meredith), a busted-down vaudevillian whose daughter Faye (Karen Black) is the sort of teasing, intemperate beauty who slaughters men with a smile. Karen Black is a bothersome actress at best, strident and sloppy; she does not even have what acting schools call "the physical apparatus" to be sensual. Faye represents another hopeless dream whose vulgar impossibility is supposed to make her, like Hollywood itself, all the more seductive. She must be ruinously alluring; Black merely looks wrecked.

Nothing is right here, except for Sutherland and a quiet scene where he sits in a garden chair, almost sleeping in the sun, listening to oranges fall from a tree. He is waiting to die. It is all in his face, conveyed by Sutherland with the fine subtlety the rest of this movie so flagrantly lacks. It is Faye's face that is emblematic of The Day of the Locust--twisted, false and clumsy, a death mask made of Silly Putty.

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