Word: locusts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Locust. "The violet hush of twilight was descending over Los Angeles as my hostess, Violet Hush, and I left its suburbs headed toward Hollywood. In the distance a glow of huge piles of burning motion picture scripts lit up the sky. The crisp tang of frying writers and directors whetted my appetite. How good it was to be alive, I thought, inhaling deep lungfuls of carbon monoxide... A suttee was in progress by the road side... Violet and I elbowed our way through the crowd. An enormous funeral pyre composed of thousands of feet of film and scripts drenched with...
...better, and Gatsby is pretty good proof. When it gets sentimental, it doesn't do it a quarter as well as Wuthering Heights and when it talks about America, it misses the boat altogether. If it had only done as sensitive a translating job as The Day of the Locust has done, it might have been at least a decent, if not well-liked, movie, it closes in on all the wrong things, and gets at nothing that Fitzgerald did. Only one performance really works and that is Sam Waterston's sensitive and physically correct Nick. He, not Redford...
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...
...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...
...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...