It stars Donald Sutherland, Karen Black, William Atherton, Burgess Meredith, Richard Dysart, John Hillerman and Geraldine Page.

Set in Hollywood, California, just before World War II, the film conveys the alienation and desperation of a disparate group of people whose dreams of success do not come true.

Aspiring artist and recent Yale graduate Tod Hackett arrives in 1930s Hollywood to work as an art department production illustrator at a major film studio.

He rents an apartment in the San Bernardino Arms, a rundown bungalow court occupied by various people, many on the fringes of the industry: Among them are Faye Greener, a tawdry aspiring actress; her father Harry, an ex-vaudevillian; Abe Kusich, a dwarf who carries on a tempestuous relationship with his girlfriend, Mary; Adore Loomis, a young boy whose mother is hoping to turn him into a child star; and Homer Simpson, a repressed accountant who lusts after Faye.

Some time later, Faye and Homer take Harry to a holy roller church gathering led by a female preacher known as Big Sister, who performs a public "healing" of him in an attempt to cure his heart ailment, but he subsequently dies.

Later, the premiere of The Buccaneer is taking place at Grauman's Chinese Theatre, attended by celebrities and a large crowd of fans and actors, including Faye.

[5] 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...

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.

"[6] 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.

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.

"[7] 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.

It misses crucial aspects of the book's surrealism and satire, though it has a fair number of compensations if you don't care about what's being ground underfoot - among them, Conrad Hall's cinematography and... one of Donald Sutherland's better performances.

"[9] Channel 4 deemed 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.