Highly Overrated But Still Good

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

I don't need to add any more to the other reviews which embrace this film as it needs to be. What is interesting to me is why it is rarely seen any more? I've seen it exactly once when it was first released and never since. But it left an indelible impression and I've yet to find it on DVD. And now I read that Hollywood tried to suppress publication of the West novella. Is it possible that you never see it on tv because HollyRock doesn't want it seen?

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.

Nicely done skewering of Hollywood in the 1930s. Well, maybe more than just Hollywood bites the dust. In sociology, "Hollywood" is simply a more intense expression of what goes on in everyday life, as the nose is a prominent feature but is still part of the face.The movie preserves Nathaniel West's distinction between the performers and the audience, though they meld towards the end. Among the more obvious of the actors is Karen Black as a flirtatious movie extra, and her father, Burgess Meredith, a salesman selling a bag of tricks. The observers include William Atherton as the viewer's proxy, a recent graduate of Yale summoned to Hollywood as an art director; and Donald Sutherland as Homer Simpson (great name), a pathologically inhibited accountant from the Midwest who has "come to California to die." They all live in the San Bernardino bungalow courts or garden apartments or whatever they are. The architecture of Southern California is a marvel, with fake mission style, fake Southern plantation, fake thatch-roofed English cottage, fake Arabian Nights apartments. Robert Benchley lived in The Ali Baba bungalows, which may, in itself, have been enough to drive him to drink. I recently stayed at the Taj Mahal Motel, which vaguely resembled a miniature of its namesake, only painted Day-Glo purple -- unless the whole thing was some Arabian apparition induced by the toxic atmosphere. But, in any case, nothing is what it seems to be made of. The huge, hammered-metal hinges on the doors of the Medieval castle turn out to be of insubstantial tin.All the characters are pathetic but the one I found most nearly sympathetic is Homer Simpson, Sutherland, who wants only to be left alone until he drops, like the over-ripe oranges on his back yard tree. But he's swept up by incidents into coming to adore and house Karen Black's fake slut. She acts like a floozy and, until she needs the money, she may actually be the seventeen-year-old virgin she claims to be. But Sutherland is to Black what a Handiwipe is to us.Characters come and go, and their relationships become complicated. William Atherton, for instance, the sophisticated artist from the East, falls for Karen Black and becomes embittered when she dumps him for someone she can get more out of. He's blandly handsome and a little innocent. Karen Black is sadly miscast. She's big and strong and her eyes are close together, making her manipulativeness obvious. What was needed was a beautiful young teen-ager whose narcissism is justified and who could lie convincingly to herself and others. Burgess Meredith dies and leaves a lovely pink-cheeked corpse. One expects someone to walk up to the casket and remark, "My, doesn't he look natural." Except he doesn't. He looks more beautiful than ever, the handiwork of an expensive undertaker who knows exactly how to make death mimic life.There are a couple of action scenes. The armies of Napoleon and Wellington fall from a fake wooden hillside that collapses. It's difficult not to chuckle as one absurdly clad soldier after another charges into the widening crater.At the end, there is a self-destructive riot built around the premier of a Major Motion Picture and Sutherland's finally popping like a zit and stomping a noxious child to death as Mr. Hyde did. The letting loose of the built-up tension in frenzied hysteria lasts maybe a little too long but it successfully projects the empty, thumotic restlessness that animates the everyday masquerade.

Perhaps the most anti-Hollywood movie ever made by Hollywood! Scarcely seen since its 1975 release, and all-but-forgotten except among devout movie fans, it's worth seeing if only for the meticulous recreation of the period when Hollywood went from golden pond to fetid cesspool. Most all the principals prove to be immoral and hideous, as foreshadowed by the apartment wall paintings of the lead, a movie art director who arrives in town full of hope and optimism, but soon ends up wallowing in the same gutter as the cockroach characters he once emulated and admired.The movie unfolds much like if one actually moved to Hollywood - lots of glitz and glam at first, until the seediness and evilness takes center stage. Donald Sutherland is particularly powerful, as a somewhat dimwitted innocent whose turn for the worse at the end of the movie provides one of the most shocking and memorable climaxes in movie history. If you haven't seen or heard about it, I won't spoil it here - if you're lucky enough to come across Day of the Locust, DON'T read any of the IMDb or online reviews until AFTER viewing. I guarantee you'll be whacked over the head with some powerful surprises ---