The Day of The Locust 18

The Day of the Locust follows the lives of several residents of the crumbling San Bardino Arms apartments up in the hills at the edge of Hollywood. We meet the aspiring actress Faye Greener (Karen Black) and her door-to-door salesman father, Harry (Burgess Meredith); Homer Simpson – portrayed by a fantastically eerie Donald Sutherland – an accountant who is in love with Faye, and Tod Hackett (William Atherton), a fresh-faced graduate set designer. These vignettes of Hollywood clichés in The Day of the Locust find characters that are forever on the fringes, desperately clinging to the dream of finding fame and riches in the bright lights; the distinction between reality and fantasy kept in a state of perpetual distortion. Schlesinger’s film is a truly epic and frenzied panorama of 1930s Hollywood.