The Day of the Locust

Day Of The Locust exudes authenticity, from the costuming to the cars, from the exotic clothes to the marcelled hair styles. Read full review

Magnificent production, combined with excellent casting and direction, make The Day of the Locust as fine a film (in a professional sense) as the basic material lets it be. Nathanael West's novel about losers on the Hollywood fringe has lost little of its verisimilitude in adaptation. Read full review

The movie finally becomes just an exercise, then: a brilliant one at times, and with a wealth of sharp-edged performances, but without people for its things to happen to. Read full review

Schlesinger's adaptation of Nathaniel West's classic novella, the Hollywood of the 1930s is decidedly as ruinous for its denizens as the Hollywood of the 1970s. [28 Jul 2000]

Exquisitely painful look at how Hollywood turns its hopefuls into whores. [03 May 1992, p.B35]

There's vivid period atmosphere and similarly vibrant performances from a cast headed by Karen Black and Donald Sutherland. [24 Mar 1985, p.5]

Its grossness—its bigger-than-life quality — is so much a part of its style (and what West was writing about) that one respects the extravagances, the almost lunatic scale on which Mr. Schlesinger has filmed its key sequences. Read full review

A tale of the losers and chancers rattling around Hollywood's fringe, the film fatally lacks the black humour and nightmarish edge of Nathanael West's source novel. But there are some good elements swarming through the muddle, not least the performances from Karen Black as a lowly starlet and Donald Sutherland as the emotional wreck who falls under her spell. Read full review

A painfully misconceived reduction and simplification by writer Waldo Salt and director John Schlesinger of the great Nathanael West novel about Hollywood in the late 30s. Read full review

A mosaic that never comes together.

The movie begs comparison with the book only because every alteration has made the story so much less interesting and intriguing than its source. Obvious and mushy beneath its dazzling surface, the film fails on its own terms. [12 May 1975, p.104]

For all Mr. Schlesinger's misapplied conventionality, these characters remain too abstract in the film, and the violent climax feels bombastic and preposterous rather than meaningful. [21 Jun 2004, p.27]

Teamed again after Midnight Cowboy, writer Waldo Salt and director John Schlesinger make a costly flop of Nathanael West's great novella about underbelly '30s Hollywood. Karen Black is just OK as craven screen wannabe Fay Greener, but, along with M*A*S*H, this is Donald Sutherland's greatest lead (as a dweeb named Homer Simpson). [08 Jun 2004]

Admittedly the book, an elusive, mesmeric work of associated images and ideas, surreal and analytical, would present problems for the most talented of film-makers. But Schlesinger really blows it. Read full review