MOVIES

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For technical superiority, the third season wins hands down. The color is the best, the camerawork is tbps, and sequences in every episode simply are handled with more professional cate. I've been overlooking the monsters in these episodes, and that's the real clue. The best episodes are the ones with monsters ("The Savage Curtain," "Devil in the Dark," etc.) cuz that's when the writers ain't trying to be too dippy and symbolic. That implies MEANING vbut the best thing bout Star Trek is the ACTION. And you get action in the first show of season #3 that outdoes any episode of Gunsmoke. Yup, the Enterprise crew (that is, the fools that beam down in this one) gotta fight sofne real western heroes in "Spectre of the Gun." It's all an illusion, of course. (Ain't that what sci-fi is all about, dodq?) And in "Plato's Stepchildren" (featuring midget Michael Dunn taking time off from his Wild, Wild West chores), there's plenty yahoo action, too, with Kirk and Spock doing acrobatics and jumping round on all fours acting silly (doing the utmost humilialting antics c^pt pissing on each other) cuz their brainwaves are being manipulated by these Greek meanies. And best of all, in "The Way to Eden," +he hippies take over the Enterprise, and Mr. Spock even jams with "em on his Vulcan harp (he being him and all).

But the crowning achievement of the third season (wrapping it all up for Star Trek this time, gang, till the kids bring it back on again to run against The Six Million Dollar Man) is 'one episode called "Spock's Brain." In this; Spock has'literally lost his mind (somebody stole it) so they gotta rip his skull off and put it back in. Meanwhile, Spock wanders around aimlessly, bumping into walls and tripping over his own feet, just like he had cerebral palsy or something. Just like Leonard Nimoy's appearance on the^-CP Telethon this year.

(Whatta joker!)

THE DAY OF THE LOCUST (Paramount)

Directed by

John Schlesinger

Hollywood has always managed to remain beyond scrutiny. Movies may come and go in a fever of unconverted nitrate; actors and actresses can succeed in wiping themselves out at a tender age, but there will always remain HOLLYWOOD—an unsympathetic, unmoving monolith which attracts people like moths to light, people without identity and purpose who are then promised a lot of things they're never going to get. What is the result?

According to John Schlesinger, in his new film The Dai; of the Locust, the result is violence. In a spasm of selfflagellation, Hollywood has allowed the outsider Schlesinger to adapt Nathanael West's 1939 classic novella to the screen to deal with West's truth about Hollywood: it's a disaster area, a beacon in the desert where people transfixed with the idea of MAKING IT come, according to the legend, by car, by bus, by train, in search of THE dream. In 1939 as today, their fate is the same. The folk quickly get fed up with sunshine and oranges, and they want more. The realities of making it means polishing spittoons in a Bowery Boys sequence or sucking off some chief gaffer to the third director of a non-descript B movie. The mass of people who don't even reach such questionable pinnacles of success are left to gawk, to wait patiently for Clark Gable's or Jimmy Page's limo to pass or to hope for a multiple car accident to occur.. .and then to die in the afternoon sun, it's all the same. The logical end result of an unemployed populace in the shadow of the Dream Factory is to become part of the Dream Dump. Any discarded fantasy will do to take the sting out of the bread line, however macabre or off the wall.

The film, The Day of the Locust expands West's apocalyptic vision, but leaves the impression right off the bat that an ugly mob is forming.'

Tod Hackett (William Atherton) is a Yale art student who is commissioned to work for Paramount Studios, but is really summoned blindly to Hollywood to record the day to day freak show for a painting, a Goya/Daumier ripoff he calls "The Burning of Los Angeles" (in the midday sun according to West). Tod immediately falls for Fay Greener (Karen Black), a dress extra for the studio, "a tin pan alley tune" he can't get out of his head.

By the middle of The Day of the Locust, for anyone who has read the West novella, it becomes obvious that much has been sacrificed for so called "dramatic structure" and the movie begins to fall into the Gatsby's vapid trap: interpretations too literal and not literal enough., But the movie and Schlesinger's saving grace, if any, are West's unforgettable characters: Harry Greener (Burgess Meredith), the vaudevillian wipeout who in one fell swoop went from Song and Dance to Death of a Salesman; Claude Estee (Richard Dysart), the studio honcho who harbors no illusions about himself or Tinsel Town: "We're grown men selling mud pies to the great unwashed;" Homer Simpson J( (Donald Sutherland), whose cornspun ignorance stimulates Faye to greater acts of self-deception and sadism. Earle and Miguel, \lvho pit cocks in Homer's garage, a pagan blood ritual, symbolic of the carnage, surfacing by the minute as the mob grows steadily. L West had his act down with a vicious certainty in The Day of the Locust. Schlesinger's choice of ahtors and the caution he takes to embalm his memory (West was wiped out in a car crash shortly after the book Locust was completed in 1940) inspre a more credible reading than the exquisitely awful Great Gatsby which, in a way, stands as a companion piecevto Locust:

In retrospect, I didn't appreciate the( way "creative"" producer Jerome Hellman, screenwriter Waldo Salt and director Schlesinger got together and tacked on the Big Sister section (a spinoff of Aimee Semple McPherson, an evangelistic hustler of Hollywood in the 30's: "Jesus owns the oil well and gasoline is prayer"). But they more than made up for it in the million dollar ribt scene at the end of the movie, triggered by Homer stomping to death tne fievilish child actor Adore (Jack Haley).

It's difficult to tell, though, whether the ending is more DeMille or West (the riot, "The Burning of Los Angeles" occurs at a DeMilje premiere). It's not a pretty picture t (it's pretty to look at) but Locust is probably the best attempt to deal with Hollywood, the disease. The irony is that in making such a movie, Hollywood has never been healthier. Every bit actor in Hollywood was in the riot scene; West would have gotten a big laugh out of that.

Gregg Sutter