Schlesinger has conceived his film as an epic, which was a daring thing to do with such slender material. But there are scenes in which his vision really does work. Little characters grow larger and take on greater importance. Homer's awkwardness in the face of Faye's tarnished and slight glamour is like America's, and we feel the nation clinging to Saturday night fantasies while everything is collapsing in broad daylight. The film's portrait of Southern California, from the lawn sprinkler lazily sparkling in the sun to nights filled with drunkenness and desperation, is exactly right, and it's astonishing to learn that Schlesinger mostly used sets. The film looks shot on location.
And yet there's something fundamentally wrong with "The Day of the Locust," and that's made most clear in the violent, spectacular riot near the film's end. A world premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theater has drawn all of the locusts, who strain against the police lines, hungry for sustenance from the stars hurrying inside. Across the street, Homer, driven beyond the point of feeble resistance by the calculated sadism of the child actor, tries to stomp him to death. There's instantly a riot, and in the faces of the crowd, we begin to see the faces of a painting Tod was working on -- a painting of apocalypse.
And the problem is that we really see the faces - representations of the literal painting, as if we couldn't be trusted to find the connection ourselves. That's really the weakness of the whole film, that Schlesinger had to insist on his points instead of letting them naturally reveal themselves. Maybe the film was too expensive to take chances with.
But somewhere on the way to its final vast metaphors, "The Day of the Locust" misplaces its concern with its characters. We begin to sense that they're marching around in response to the requirements of the story, instead of leading lives of their own. And so we stop worrying about them, because they're doomed anyway and not always because of their own shortcoming.
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.
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