A provocative and disquieting look at the seedy underbelly of Hollywood''s golden age of the 30's, although I'd be lying if I said It was enjoyable viewing. Too often for me it felt like watching a freak show, an obvious reaction when considering some of the peripheral characters like the nasty little tap-dancing would-be child star who later ends up getting tap-danced to death in the film's climactic scene, a bloodthirsty midget and a drunken failed comedian turned door-to-door salesman, among others. The same judgement is almost as relevant when considering the three main characters, Tod Browning (Edward Atherton) the aspirant artist obsessively in love with Harlow look-alike Faye Greener herself, (Karen Black) who initially values her chastity enough to spurn Browning's well-meaning advances under the pretext of saving herself for the love of a rich man but who instead succumbs to a drunken non-English speaking Latino and an almost unrecognisable Donald Sutherland as the hapless and as it turned out, ironically-named Homer Simpson as the gormless societal outcast who naively takes in Greener after her drunken father (Burgess Meredith) plays his famous final scene once too often. Watching these three and the surrounding characters is like watching so many snakes in a barrel and far from edifying viewing but there's something compulsive in their actions even as you know it's going to end in disaster and tragedy coincidentally at a major movie premiere where at last these extras and bit players on the Hollywood horizon steal the limelight from the big stars in their midst. Several of the scenes are deliberately repulsive showing human nature at its worst climaxing in a riotous maelstrom triggered when Sutherland's character endures one humiliation too many leading to a bloody and too vivid realisation of Browning's nightmarish artistic creations from earlier in the film. Remembering some of the true-life scandals which hit Golden Age Hollywood involving the likes of Fatty Arbuckle and Harlow herself, not everything is as outlandish and exaggerated as you might first think. Still, I feel the movie would have benefited from having even one pivotal character to act as the viewer's guide (Browning or even Simpson, for example) so that I was left with a feeling of loathing and revulsion pretty much all the through. The acting I found to be solid right through the cast although I'm guessing grotesquery isn't hard to portray. The direction by John Schlesinger captures well the shabby existences of what Hal David much later termed "all the stars that never were". This blacker than black inside portrait of vintage Hollywood reeks of decadence and ruin but perhaps overdid the bleakness to the extent of repelling at least this viewer although several of the images evoked carry undeniable and shocking power rare in contemporary Tinseltown.
Review of The Day of the Locust
