In his review in '' The New York Times '' , Vincent Canby called it " less a conventional film than it is a gargantuan panorama , a spectacle that illustrates West 's dispassionate prose with a fidelity to detail more often found in a gimcracky Biblical epic than in something that so relentlessly ridicules American civilization ... The movie is far from subtle , but it does n't matter . It seems that much more material was shot than could be easily fitted into the movie , even at 144 minutes ... It is reality projected as fantasy . Its grossness — its bigger-than-life quality — is so much a part of its style ( and what West was writing about ) that one respects the extravagances , the almost lunatic scale on which Mr. Schlesinger has filmed its key sequences . " Jay Cocks of '' Time '' said ; " '' The Day of the Locust '' looks puffy and overdrawn , sounds shrill because it is made with a combination of self-loathing and tenuous moral superiority . This is a movie turned out by the sort of mentality that West was mocking . Salt 's adaptation ... misses what is most crucial : West 's tone of level rage and tilted compassion , his ability to make human even the most grotesque mockery . " Roger Ebert of the '' Chicago Sun-Times '' called it a " daring , epic film ... a brilliant one at times , and with a wealth of sharp-edged performances , " citing that of Donald Sutherland as " one of the movie 's wonders , " although he expressed some reservations , noting that " 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 . " In the '' Chicago Reader '' , Jonathan Rosenbaum described the film as " a painfully misconceived reduction and simplification ... of the great Nathanael West novel about Hollywood ... It misses crucial aspects of the book 's surrealism and satire , though it has a fair number of compensations if you do n't care about what 's being ground underfoot - among them , Conrad Hall 's cinematography and ... one of Donald Sutherland 's better performances . " Channel 4 calls it " fascinating , if flawed " and " by turns gaudy , bitter and occasionally just plain weird , " adding " great performances and magnificent design make this a spectacular and highly entertaining film . " The film was shown at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival , but was n't entered into the main competition
1975 Cannes Film Festival
1975 Cannes Film Festival
The Day of the Locust (film)