Movies Depicting Fauntleroy Suits: The Day of the Locust, 1975

Figure 1.--The "Day of the Locust" was set in 1939. One of the characters was a boy whose mother wanted to get him him into movies. She dressed him in a Fauntleroy-type suit to make him look cute and more appealing for movie roles.

Nathanael West's book is a classic of Hollywood literature, that often dark and satirical subgenre populated by such authors as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joan Didion and Aldous Huxley. It is a negative look at the decadent Hollywood of the late 1930's. A young artist (named Homer Simpson) searching for glamour encounters a dismal world of broken people and shattered dreams. Here, West tells the story of characters on the fringe of the entertainment industry, Homer Simpson (coincidence?), Faye Greener, and Tod Hackett. The reader may be left a little flat by the spare prose West uses in his tale, remeniscent of noir fiction. The story is terse and biting. Each character has come to California seeking fame or health in the shining city, and each carries his own history of bitterness and dreams. The imagery West uses to illustrate the moral decay of this fringe population is sometimes disturbing, sometimes inspired, and occasionally presages events still decades into the future for Los Angeles. I, myself, was left looking for more depth to the characters, as well as left dreaming of the romance of Depression-era California.

The basic plot involves a young scene designer and aspiring actress in 1930s Hollywood. She is naive, manipulative, self-centered, yet full of life and hope. He falls in love with her, but she has no intentions of falling for him. Any plot summary about the surface storyline is almost beside the point though, because this movie is far more a study of human nature, both of individuals and of groups and crowds. It seems to be a movie about appetites as much as anything....hunger for fame, sex, riches, recognition; and about rage, both repressed and terrifyingly expressed.

Its pace is slow, and it is not light viewing. If you watch without paying too much attention, or wander off for five minutes here or there to get some popcorn or whatever, you probably will find it rather odd and rambling. But it's well written and complex characters will draw in the careful viewer, and by the time you do reach the end, it will leave you very, very disturbed.

The Day of the Locust depicts a child in Hollywood who in an effort to make him look cute, is dressed up in a Fauntleroy-like suit. The suit was not velvet. It was rather like a shortbpants suit, but worn with a frilly collar and bow, The film was based on a book published by a playwrite in 1939 about his experiences in Hollywood. Like many boys wearing Fauntleroy suits in this era, he was depicted as a terrible brat--the cleche of the era.

I'm not sure who the boy was that plays the child. Perhaps William Atherton