The Day of the Locust (John Schlesinger, 1975)

It's no surprise that it took nearly forty years for Nathanael West's 1939 novel The Day of the Locust to get any sort of Hollywood treatment if only because Hollywood, in the year of its greatest flowering, could never countenance such a venomous critique of its ubiquity. But the New Hollywood brats were running amok by the 1970s and West's disdain for Tinseltown was tailor-made for mavericks like Schlesinger and screenwriter Waldo Salt. For one thing, no classical Hollywood director could get away with a faithful airing of the novel's pulpier aspects of nasty violence. For another, the impressionistic, foreshortened chapters found a home in the discursive narratives championed by the New Hollywood directors and their supporters. Like the best of those films, The Day of the Locust dazzles in its indigestibility - its heroless trajectory, its dead-end scenes, its hothouse zoom-cured graphics. 

The only problem with both film and novel is that they traffic in an unearned contempt for humanity. West deserves plaudits for pulling off the paradoxical trick of excavating the interiorities of his most vacuous characters. Nowhere is this more effective as when Homer Simpson [sic] (played with contents-under-pressure subtlety by Donald Sutherland in the film) tries to fill the emptiness of his home by singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" - "It was the only he song he knew." Pace Adorno, I cannot think of a more accurate depiction of a pathetic, incurious life. 

But because West subscribes to the theory that "nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure," his misanthropy gets wearying. Even in the opening pages, he portrays Los Angeles with no hope: "Only dynamite would be of any use against the Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles that lined the slopes of the canyon."And as with any garden-variety misanthrope, he professes to know the interiority of the masses or at least the mass accrued outside a Hollywood premiere awaiting their allegorical death by immolation in the climax: "It allowed itself to be hustled and shoved out of habit and because it lacked an objective. It tolerated the police, just as a bull elephant does when he allows a small boy to drive him with a light stick." You get the impression that West feels they deserve the violence that befalls them because "[t]hey haven't the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure." That last is particularly galling since it attributes moral failing in part to a lack of wealth. And it leaves no room to honor those without money who have the equipment for leisure and pleasure, staving off a meaninglessness to which West so weakly succumbs.

Grade: A-minus

Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969)

Midnight Cowboy stands as one of the great phantasmagorias of 1960s Hollywood cinema. Visually and sonically, the film astonishes. It matters not a whit that Schlesinger interrupts the narrative with moments of short-shelf-life psychedelia (rapid editing, telephoto-flattened images, blue-and-white flashbacks, dazzling superimpositions) or that he puts them in the service of skin-deep critiques of consumerism or NYC savagery. They form little de facto avant-garde films that generate surges of jittery, intense excitement. And the music only heightens the effect. Listen to the record-scratch rhythms that overamp the sweetness in John Barry's "Florida Fantasy" or the eternally returning Nilsson version of Fred Neil's "Everybody's Talkin'" that drains the song of hope with each go around. Everything nags at you evoking both the energy and danger of city living. 

Then there are the myriad indigestible trills: a mother and son playing with a plastic rat in a diner; a bowl of matches behind a curiosity cabinet/color wheel; kids fishing off a bridge in Florida; radio voices linked miles away to the talking heads who own them; dozens of extras afforded a closeup. Rampant homophobia too, more an ugly part of the landscape than assurance that Joe Buck (Jon Voight) and Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) enjoy a properly heterosexual bromance. In short, Schlesinger has expended a great deal of effort to fashion a complex outer and inner life for two (and more!) characters whom society would much rather sweep into a sewer. It's such a rich, surprising film that I might even claim it's the closest Hollywood ever got to Ulysses in deeming less-than-ordinary lives worthy of the highest art.

Grade: A