The Day of the Locust (film)

The Day of the Locust is a 1975 American drama film directed by John Schlesinger, and starring William Atherton, Karen Black, Donald Sutherland, and Geraldine Page. The screenplay by Waldo Salt is based on the 1939 novel of the same title by Nathanael West. Set in Hollywood, California just prior to World War II, it depicts the alienation and desperation of a disparate group of individuals whose dreams of success have failed to come true.

There are unusual and bizarrely disturbing images a middleaged man sits in an untended garden staring at a large lizard that stares back a young woman is transported into the film shes watching and finds herself portraying a harem girl in old Baghdad a dwarf tenderly caresses a rooster, bleeding and dazed from a cockfight,and then tosses it back into the ring to its death an androgynous child beckons to a man through a window and performs a grotesque imitation of Mae West.These brief vignettes do little to advance the basic plot, but they serve to shape the audiences understanding of the era depicted as one of Hollywood sleaziness and wholesale alienation. Spectacle fills the screena set of the Waterloo battlefield collapses on the extras during the making of the film within the film. In the films climax, an enraged Homer brutally tramples a child near Graumans Chinese Theater as crowds gather for the premiere of a new film. Seeing this, the enraged crowd swarms over and kills Homer. Almost immediately, the entire crowd is driven to riot, turning on itself, smashing store windows, overturning cars, trampling each other to death and turning the already packed street into a war zone. Severely injured, a delirious Tod imagines some of the mob take on the appearance of the characters in his own grotesque painting The Burning of Los Angeles. ........

Source: Wikipedia