"Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous," Nathanael West wrote, and proceeded to show the truly ordinary as monstrous in his fever-dream novel of L.A., Day of the Locust. John Schlesinger's film attempts a faithfulness to West's novel that few adaptations even strive for; so we are given a vivid picture of L.A. in the thirties as a nightmare haven for small-town dreamers, living in bungalows, waiting for the end. Old people sitting on bus benches, looking as if they'd already died; the child-star as living gargoyle, the starlet as prostitute and the prostitute as star: Schlesinger renders all of this and more. Visually, the film registers a kind of languor that only the Los Angeles sky can imbue, filtering the sun to a golden yellow and lying heavily on the bungalows and sleepy streets. And Schlesinger is also faithful to the events of the novel. What is missing in Day of the Locust, the film, is the acrid satire that West's narration provided. The disdain he wrote into his characters is only occasionally translated-in Burgess Meredith as the constant dissembler Harry Greener, Billy Barty as the midget Abe; but William Atherton's Tod seems hardly capable of the apocalyptic vision attributed to him, and Karen Black's Faye Greener has no enigmatic edges. Donald Sutherland is appropriately nebulous as Homer, but without West's "scripting" (via Tod), we have no access to his character, or his crisis. Still, Day of the Locust remains a bizarre screen vision, in its way more radically grotesque than any of its Hollywood-on-Hollywood predecessors, including Sunset Boulevard.