Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-qs9v7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-13T03:27:48.114Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - The Day of the Locust: 1939 and 1975

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 January 2010

By
Christopher Ames
Edited by
R. Barton Palmer
Christopher Ames
Affiliation:
Provost and Dean of the College, Washington College
R. Barton Palmer
Affiliation:
Clemson University, South Carolina
Get access

Summary

When Nathanael West (1903–1940) completed the manuscript of The Day of the Locust in 1938, he would not have envisioned the novel being adapted into a Hollywood film. Indeed, he consciously maintained a great distance between his screenwriting for Republic and RKO and his Hollywood novel, which focused on disaffected outsiders and drifters. The novel was explicitly an opportunity for him to create the kind of art and express the kind of vision that he could not within the confines of studio employment. As Claude Estee says of one of Tod's cynical observations about love in the novel, “It's good, but it's not for pictures.”

The Production Code was one reason that The Day of the Locust was not suitable for adaptation. Consider its romantic plot, in which an attractive ingénue is desired by three men (a studio artist, a cowboy extra, and an emotionally damaged early retiree), flirts with all of them and then sleeps with an indigent Mexican after a drunken party featuring cockfights. Consider as well her friendship with prostitutes and her selling her body to pay for her father's funeral. The stag film at the bordello, the main character's rape fantasies, the disturbing ending with an assault on a child and a riot at a Hollywood premiere: virtually all the key features of the story would likely run afoul of the Production Code standards.

But these problems are merely symptomatic of a larger, ideological difficulty.

Type
Chapter
Information
Twentieth-Century American Fiction on Screen , pp. 47 - 67
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ames, Christopher, Movies About the Movies: Hollywood Reflected (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1997).Google Scholar
Bogle, Donald, Toms, Coons, Mulattos, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Continuum Publishing, 2003).Google Scholar
Boyle, T. C., Tortilla Curtain (London: Bloomsbury, 1995).Google Scholar
Cohen, William A., “Manual Conduct in Great Expectations,” in Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, ed. Janice Carlisle (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), pp. 572–591.
Cook, David A., Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970–1979, 10 vols., Volume IX: History of the American Cinema, vols., gen. ed. Harpole, Charles (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2002).Google Scholar
Connelly, Michael, Angels Flight (New York: Warner, 2001).Google Scholar
Davis, Mike, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 1990).Google Scholar
Davis, Mike, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Holt, 1998).Google Scholar
Didion, Joan, “Los Angeles Notebook,” in Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem (New York: Modern Library, 2000), pp. 198–205.Google Scholar
Ellison, Ralph, Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1972).Google Scholar
Fiedler, Leslie A., Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Dell, 1966).Google Scholar
Fine, Richard, Hollywood and the Profession of Authorship, 1928–1940 (Ann Arbor: UMI Press, 1985).Google Scholar
Gabbard, Krin, Jammin' At the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).Google Scholar
Gabbard, Krin, “Louis Armstrong's Life as a Man,” Chronicle of Higher Education 30 (June 2000).Google Scholar
Gabler, Neal, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Doubleday, 1988).Google Scholar
Kolker, Robert, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, and Altman 3rd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Martin, Jay, Nathanael West: The Art of His Life (New York: Hayden, 1970).Google Scholar
Pogel, Nancy, and William Chamberlain, “Humor into Film: Self-Reflections in Adaptations of Black Comic Novels,” in Alan R. Pratt, ed., Black Humor: Critical Essays (New York: Garland, 1993), pp. 269–281.
Schessler, Ken, This is Hollywood: An Unusual Guide (Redlands, CA: Schessler, 1993).Google Scholar
Simon, Richard Keller, “Between Capra and Adorno: West's The Day of the Locust and the Movies of the 1930s,” Modern Language Quarterly 54:4 (1993), pp. 513–534.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Starr, Kevin, Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).Google Scholar
West, Nathanael, Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust (New York: New Directions, 1962).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×