The Day of the Locust

What is this, Five Flew Into the Cuckoo's Nest? I found this much-ballyhooed movie detestable from start to finish. I almost walked out. It tells the non-fascinating tale of a bunch of moronic retards tearing up each other$s lives, and it contains the biggest collection of grotesques since BLOOD SUCKING FREAKS (which I never saw, of course, but just sounds like a movie with the ultimate in grotesques). At least part of the unpleasantness may be due to the fact that there is not one sympathetic character in the picture. I've also decided that I hate Karen Black (and I certainly hate her character here). Her idea of acting seems to be to take on as many affectations as possible. I hate her eyes, which are straight on top and round on the bottom. I hate her amblyopia. I may hate Donald Sutherland (about whom I've always had reservations) and I definitely hate his character here--a limpid variation on Bible toting fanatics of other movies, except all this one does is wring his hands. William Atherton plays the"hero," an impotent little twerp whose only redeeming feature is that he went to Yale. This movie conatins just about all the things I hate in movies: organ music, faith healers talking about JE-SUS, cockfights, and Karen Black smoking.

This picture is all about Karen Black smoking--how she does it, when she does it, who lights her cigarettes. If you are interested in how Karen Black smokes, then don't miss it. What is the point of this big, expensive picture, directed by the usually reliable John (“Midnight Cowboy,” “ Marathon Man”) Schlesinger? I don't know. Is it that Hollywood is really corrupt and vulgar? Or is the big irony that, at the end, when Sutherland is literally being torn apart by a mob, a radio announcer mistakes it for opening night high spirits? Wow. Deep. On top of everything else, at the end of the picture, we get a bunch of scenes of mob violence and fires and stuff that was so out of context with the tone of the rest of the picture that I actually started to laugh. Looked like outtakes from “Apocalypse Now.” What happened? Did they suddenly say, "Hey! Nothing exciting has happened! We'd better put in something sensational!"? Nothing really follows in any kind of narrational or motivational way. The picture just keeps throwing in odd, disparate elements for no apparent reasomn. Not only that, it does it for nearly 2-1/2 hours. Yikes.