Eavesdropping at the Movies will be podcasting on John Schlesinger’s fascinating The Day of the Locust, so an evaluation of the film in greater depth will follow. For now, I just want to signal two moments in the film that I found beautiful and that I’d like to go back to:
The first: Faye Greener’s wishes, shot through with darkness and gorgeously back-lit by Conrad Hall. By the end, Karen Black appears with a halo as her face falls into shadow; Greener a saintly character clearly already lost and headed to murkier pastures:
The second: the glorious little tap-dance Burgess Meredith chooses for his ex-vaudevillian character, now reduced to selling door-to-door but giving the day a bit of uplift with his heels:
José Arroyo
