The Day of the Locust (1975)
1.85:1 (16x9 Enhanced)
Dolby Digital 5.1
Paramount Home Entertainment, $14.99

Adapated from Nathanael West’s 1939 novel of the same name, The Day of the Locust offers a savage portrayal of marginalized and often delusional Hollywood hopefuls who have grown bitter about the hollow promises of the Tinseltown “dream factory.” Tod Hackett (William Atherton), a scenic artist for Paramount who has recently graduated from Yale, has his eye on vivacious neighbor Faye (Karen Black), an ambitious, cruel movie extra with aspirations of stardom. Faye keeps Tod at a distance because she can only let a man who is “really rich and criminally handsome” love her, but Tod carries a torch and watches other men try to woo her. When Faye’s broken father (Burgess Meredith), a vaudeville clown turned door-to-door salesman, dies, she moves in with a generous but emotionally unstable suitor, Homer (Donald Sutherland), who only has eyes for her. As tensions mount between the disturbed Homer and the sadistic Faye, the story moves toward its legendary final sequence, in which legions of screaming fans turn on the movie industry — and themselves — with ravenous, violent abandon.

Director John Schlesinger’s ambitious and generally successful adaptation of The Day of the Locust has long been a cult favorite. In creating the alternately desolate and opulent visual panorama of West’s novel, Schlesinger collaborated with Academy Award-winning cinematographer Conrad L. Hall, ASC (In Cold Blood, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). When Hall wrote of his experiences on the production for AC in 1975, he said he was attracted to the project because of his affection for the novel and his enthusiasm for working with Schlesinger. He and Schlesinger agreed on an unusual concept for shooting the picture that presented the characters in a glamorous way, allowing the harsh realities of their lives to come out of performances rather than visuals. Hall wrote, “I felt that this ‘fantasy’ element should be the theme of the visual style, that it should not be hard-edged, it should not be real and gritty. I felt it would be better if we adopted what the [characters] were after as a style, rather than what they were actually about.”

Hall researched the silks and nettings used as diffusion in the 1930s and ’40s to determine the most practical way to make a film shot in 1975 resemble the images of glamour from the early decades of Hollywood. “The diffusion was one way of achieving the fantasy point of view we had decided upon,” he explained. “The other was through the color palette. Early on, John and I talked about having a sort of ‘golden outlook’ without romanticizing the subject matter.” After many meticulous tests and trial and error with color timing, Hall created a memorable, soft look with warm traces of amber and gold that suggest memory and fantasy. He earned an Academy Award nomination for his work.

Paramount Home Entertainment’s recently released DVD of The Day of the Locust represents a missed opportunity for a number of reasons. In spite of the surprisingly solid Dolby Digital 5.1 audio presentation and 16x9 picture enhancement, the feature presentation is lackluster and largely disappointing. Grain is often too evident and distracting, suggesting that little was done to compensate during the film-to-digital transfer. The source materials appear to be in good shape, but the colors do not transfer as intended, with reds running to orange and blues moving toward violet. While the intention of the visual scheme is present, it doesn’t often get fully realized, and this transfer only succeeds in resembling the film during scenes of very intense contrasts; the final sequences look the most accurate.

Like many of Paramount’s recent catalogue releases, this DVD includes no supplemental materials. Given the prestige of the project and the caliber of the talent involved, it seems likely that a good deal of promotional material was created at the time of its release, and it’s unfortunate that nothing is included in this package — not even the film’s eerie theatrical trailer. Much like the lives of the characters The Day of the Locust presents, this DVD leaves much to be desired.

– Kenneth Sweeney