Maybe in America, but in Hollywood, there are. We call them "remakes." Like Dashiell Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon"; Warner Brothers did three versions before they got it right and then, wisely, they stopped. If they tried it again, the end-result would be reviled, because it would inevitably and unenviably be compared to the 1942 Humphrey Bogart-John Huston version and it would be found lacking, not only as a film, but as an adaptation of the source material. It is so close, in spirit, if not the letter, there'd be no point. You can't improve on it. But not "the great American novel"—"The Great Gatsby," written in 1925 by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was finding his feet trying to define the American culture that was exploding out of the fortunes garnered during The Industrial Age into The Post-Gilded Age. It seems that every decade somebody unearths it from American Literature 101 and tries again to do right by it. And the attempts started the year after it was published...
"For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses . . ."
John Winthrop, 1630
(Herbert Brenon, 1926) Based on the Broadway adaptation by Owen Davis and directed by George Cukor, the silent adaptation in the words of New Yorker critic Richard Brody "got the parties right"—why wouldn't they being so close to the source?—and featured Warner Baxter as Gatsby, Lois Wilson as Daisy Buchanan, Neil Hamilton as Nick Carraway and William Powell as George Wilson (eh? Powell could have played either Gatsby...or Tom Buchanan...and naile it), this version (despite extensive searches) is one of those silent films that has been lost through neglect, poor storage and the explosive nature of its nitrate stock. The only evidence remaining is the trailer, which you can see here, old sport.
The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.
Balzac
(Elliott Nugent, 1949)Richard Maibaum—who is best known for scripting so many James Bond films—was the guy behind the '49 version, urging friend Alan Ladd to make it. As producer-writer of the film, Maibaum had casting control, and as Ladd saw it as a great acting opportunity (and Paramount had him under contract), the studio used it as a carrot to influence Ladd to do other films. Maibaum and the original director John Farrow (interestingly, father of Mia, see below) disagreed over who should play Daisy and when Farrow wouldn't let go of the idea of Gene Tierney, he was canned over Maibaum's choice, Betty Field. This version starts in the present as Nick Carroway (Macdonald Carey) and Jordan Baker (Ruth Hussey), old married couple, visit Gatsby's simple grave ("But it's not him, Nick, it's not his style." "No, he'd have fancied something like Grant's Tomb.") etched with an inscription from the Bible—Proverbs 14:12 (which is "There is a way that seemeth right unto a man but the ends thereof are the ways of death.")
Just to position us time-wise, Carey's Nick lamely has to add "He seems like someone we knew in another time, another life, another world..." Well, it was "the Jazz Age" and Prohibition and, since then, there'd been a world war (with selfless rationing) where everyone was doing their part (as legend goes), but it is only useful hand-holding for those who have no idea the story takes place in the past (it doesn't help that knowledge that the fashions and dances are more contemporary, but the cars have a vintage feel). One would think one could get a clue from the dates on the head-stone, though.
This moral distancing from the story probably served a short-sighted convenience at the time, post-World War II, but it certainly doesn't serve the story very well. Perhaps it was to provide an enveloping "Happy Ending"—it all turned out all right in the end for Nick and Jordan, the secondary characters, so everything's fine. Too bad about the folks the story is about, though, huh?
In the book it is rumored that Gatsby once killed a man, but the 1949 makes it clear that he has...at least one...as he guns down a car full of holes and sends it crashing while on a bootlegging run. Ladd's Gatsby is less a man of mystery than a man of many mysteries, none of them seeming to ring true. We see Gatsby accompanied by Myron Lupus (Ed Begley) and "man" Klipspringer (Elisha Cook, Jr.) the day Gatsby drives up to "the valley of ashes" to find the lavish house at West Egg. Lavish it may be, but this version of "Gatsby" has a studio feel to it, all back projection and false sky-prosceniums. It's slightly claustrophobic and, despite the abundance of faux-white marble around, looks fairly cheap. Gatsby buys the West Egg mans' and walks outside through studio-"fog" to see the beckoning light from the Buchanan dock "just" across the way.
Cut to a party with Nick Carroway in attendance, but no idea why he's there. He runs into Gatsby purely by accident, suspecting him to be just another partyer and, after "bouncing" one of his "bootlegger" pals from the premises, imposes on Nick to host "the get-together" with cousin Daisy (Betty Field), he takes the opportunity during one of his parties to explain his history with an out and out fabrication that even Nick sees right through, so he tells another one about working for a man who bequeaths him a tidy sum of money. "That was in the old days when I was a sucker. Then I wised up." He doesn't waste any time asking Nick—second-cousin to Daisy Buchanan—to arrange a meeting, even offering some stock market business: "Every man has his price, Mr. Carroway. What's yours?"
The meeting is arranged with an anxious Gatsby and an ambivalent Nick and the affair between the two parted lovers begins anew. At least, that's what we're lead to assume—Ladd was so concerned about his image that he does not allow his Gatsby to be shown kissing a married woman. In fact, there's a lot of self-censorship going on: it's okay to show Gatsby plugging away at his gangster rivals, but any extra-marital affairs, whether between Gatsby and Daisy (or Tom Buchanan (Barry Sullivan) and Myrtle Wilson (Shelley Winters, nice casting that) or lost between scenes; there's even an attempt by Daisy and Tom to try to warn Gatsby that he's being hunted by a murderous George Wilson (Howard DaSilva), just to show you that they're not "bad people," despite all appearances to the contrary. That's just not the book.
Where the movie shines is in Ladd's portrayal of Gatsby—movie-star confident, but almost child-like in his devotion to Daisy (when the Buchanan's attend a Gatsby party, Ladd's host is only too anxious to steal her for a dance and the look on his face is ecstatic), which leads to a dull confusion of realization when his dreams go south. It's a nice portrayal, even if it's been buffed to appease the censors. And there's something of a practical casualness when he's seen shooting people at the beginning, a reflection of the casual cruelty that will lead to his down-fall later in the movie.
(Jack Clayton, 1974), The only reason Paramount's head of production,Robert Evans, wanted to make a movie of "The Great Gatsby" was because his wife (at the time) Ali MacGraw wanted to play Daisy Buchanan.*That was enough for Evans—at the time, the Paramount "golden boy"—to start an elaborate pre-production of a multi-million dollar picture, hiring his Godfather directorFrancis Ford Coppolato write the script and Jack Clayton to direct. Then, MacGraw signed to doThe GetawaywithSteve McQueenand the Evans-MacGraw marriage collapsed. Evans was not about to continue the picture with MacGraw in thelead, so he went casting to no real satisfaction, untilMia Farrow, who'd worked with the producer on Rosemary's Baby wrote him a note that said "Bob, can I be your Daisy?" She was signed, which rounded out an otherwise excellent cast, which included one veteran from the 1949 version—Howard DaSilva, who played the cuckolded George Wilson in that version, plays Meyer Wolfsheim "the man who fixed the 1919 World series" (who was identified as "Myron Lupus" in the 40's version—showing that the latter film wasn't afraid to tackle the anti-semitism of the novel or the prejudices of the moneyed upper-class as expressed by Tom Buchanan, played snakily byBruce Dern in "the Redford version").
This was the first adaptation I had seen, and my memories of "The Great Gatsby" are always associated with the season of Summer. I read the book during a vacation and this one was released in that season and it's reflected in the shimmering cinematography suffused with scrimmed lenses and star-filters as well as the veneer of sweat carefully applied by the make-up staff that provides its own kind of veil for the stars. The '74 Gatsby has a distance to it that separates its audience with a gauzy wall that undercuts the drama and makes us not care a fig about the people in it. Everything looks great, but the figures in the center could use some work.
Part of the fault lies in the stars: Robert Redford is a great choice for Gatsby as a vision of the man, but Redford is an intelligent actor who has always fought his looks, and here he overthinks it. His meeting with Nick is faltering, fumbling, and a bit embarrassed, it is not that of a man setting up the gambit for which he has compromised his integrity and risked his soul. The only time you see a flash of how good Redford could be is when he nearly comes to blows with Tom Buchanan—Clayton cuts to his fist tightening, then to a close-up of Redford flashing his million dollar smile. He wants the fight. He's the poor boy who didn't get to marry the rich girl and wants to paste the face of the guy who did.
William Goldman desperately wanted to do the screenplay for Gatsby—at the time Truman Capote was taking a stab at it—but came away delighted with Coppola's screenplay. Not the movie made from it, however ("they basically ignored it" said Coppola). Goldman blamed Clayton's direction—"Jack Clayton is a Brit...he had one thing all of them have in their blood...a murderous sense of class," he wrote in his follow-up to "Adventures in the Screen Trade", "Which Lies Did I Tell?" The people, the revelers, are fools and he shows the squalor, rather than the foolish hope that befalls every one that burns the candle at both ends, gambles on a "get-rich-quick" scheme, or thinks that there might be a reckoning.
That's the spirit you want to end the Tragedie of "The Great Gatsby." What does Clayton's version leave us? With a tacked on credit sequence of decamping partiers over a squeamish version of "Ain't We Got Fun?" Maybe they wanted to leave us with something upbeat to walk up the aisle to, rather than contemplate what has gone before. I remember seeing that part of the movie as a slap in the face. It made a facile treatment only that more cynical.
* Well, maybe not the only reason—Evans still harbored the idea of becoming a movie-star despite having much more power in Hollywood that a mere actor would. Given his ego and the dream-world in which he lived, he might have imagined himself in the Gatsby role, as he certainly lived the lifestyle. He certainly must have saw himself as some prototype of Gatsby. But, after this movie's box-office, his productions became more desperate, less sure—he was set up to star with Jack Nicholson in the second part of the Chinatown trilogy—and he became addicted to drugs and it all came crashing down. He must have certainly read the Gatsby novel...he just didn't heed it.
"Yours in Great Depression" During the Baz Age or I'm Half Crazy All for the Love of You....
There have been several versions of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great American Novel that have hit the big screen since the novel was first published in 1925, and nobody seems to get it right, if "right" can be got at all. There's a "lost" silent version with Warner Baxter, a 1949 version adapted by Richard Maibaum with Alan Ladd that emphasized Gatsby's gangster roots, the Robert Evans vanity production of 1974 with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, directed bloodlessly by Jack Clayton. It's a challenge to produce such a tragedy that has a boisterous first act, and such a downer of a second, but that is what makes it so special, and so American. In fact, the best version must be taken out of the novel, which was written in the midst of the period in which it was set, and take into account future events—the stock market crash in 1929 and the following "Great Depression," which sounded the death-knell for The Jazz Age with a long sustained flat note. Fitzgerald's prescient, cautionary novel proved historically accurate with 20/20 foresight to the extent that you cannot make a movie of it un-ironically, given the past that was its future, and you cannot make a complete movie of it while remaining blind to what it did not foresee in reality, but captured artistically and thematically.
Baz Luhrmann's version of The Great Gatsby jumps into that irony with both feet and splashes around in it, kicking and squealing like a child drunk with a secret. It was a weird decision to film it in 3-D, but given the way Luhrmann uses it, in vivid eye-popping colors, emphasizing the swoop of camera moves and the solidness of glass partitions, and the illusion of the reflections shimmering over it—and particularly in how he photographs our last views of East Egg, in a way that rather lovingly visualizes the novel's last line ("So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past")—one begins to wonder any other way to do it.** In a way, the movie feels like one big "Vertigo zoom" in three-dimensions (starting at the beginning credits) with an art-deco pattern that falls away to the production company logos and ending with an unfamiliar one—until you see it pop up again in Jay Gatsby's monograms.
Then, we begin the touchstones, green light on the dock, the Egg's, the parties, the infinite closet of shirts, the infidelities, "the man who fixed the 1919 World Series" (played by Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bacchan...) Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, Oculist (correctly spelled this time—it wasn't in the 1974 version), the fights, all done in Luhrmann's hyper-speed (which is maintained throughout, as opposed to his previous film Australia, which flagged after the first 45 minutes), in a style somewhere between Preston Sturges, Sam Raimi, and Tex Avery, making the performances somewhat inconsistent (but more on that later). The swooping, veering style allows for some fore-shadowing plummets down skyscrapers and serves as a visual counter-point to Jay-Z's thumping, pumping soundtrack, which is surprisingly synchronous, although slightly discordant and certainly anachronistic. It does lend the film a sense of vital excitement, however shallow, that communicates to the spirit of those times to the "youngsters" in the audience.
"One big 'Vertigo' zoom"
The neatest touch that the director throws into this Great Gatsby is the framing story paralleling F. Scott Fitzgerald, as Nick Carraway (Tobey McGuire), incarcerated in a sanatorium to dry out, composes the story at the behest of his psychiatrist (Jack Thompson), which allows Fitzgerald's words to flow out and become part of the story (the name of the sanatorium is Perkins Sanatorium, after Fitzgerald's editor, the brilliant Max Perkins, a nice little in-joke) and become part of the narrative, succinctly and effortlessly, providing a touch of elegance and perspective to the visual shenanigans.
Even that is a little problematic, as you can't believe those words and that phrasing are coming out of McGuire's googly-eyed Candide in this version—Sam Waterston's Nick in the '74 vintage and even Paul Rudd's in the 2000 BBC take, both have the mature feel for Carraway's observer/muse/co-dependent enabler—something you can't see in McGuire. It's a miscalculation, but not due to any mis-casting issues, so much as Luhrmann's ADD approach to direction.
Leonardo DiCaprio's Gatsby is prone to such inconsistency as well. After establishing Gatsby as a figure of extravagant mystery and a certain false style, Luhrmann has him marching up to Nick's cottage, servants in line behind, an image that recalls a parade. It brings a laugh, but is far too comic for the character. Sure, he's nervous, anticipating the forthcoming tea, and he's slightly out of his element. But the effect takes away from all aspects of the character, even though it plays into Gatsby's too-romantic notions of reclaiming his past. Nor does it help that DiCaprio still looks like a boy-child here.
But where the casting falls off the most is Carey Mulligan as Gatsby's lost-love, Daisy Buchanan, the instrument of his downfall. It's a tough character to cast, as difficult as Gone with the Wind's Scarlett O'Hara, seemingly worldly-wise (but actually sheltered), and fatally shallow, selfish in the moment, and murderously practical in the long run.** She needs to be someone who can dash all hopes by merely averting her gaze, and fascinating enough to attract it. And she has to evoke some sympathy for her acts, despite her flaws and practiced weaknesses. As good an actress as Mulligan is (and has been), her Daisy comes across, finally, unknowable and not interesting enough to be an object of obsession, as she must be for the whole tale to work.
In fact, it would be tough to think of a modern actress who could be so cool in her actions, and attractive to risk everything for. Stanwyck could do it, and Hepburn (Katherine), but it would take a full infusion of actorly personality to pull off. With Mulligan, there's no spider's web of promise, only a longing weakness, around which the story can revolve. And at the pace Luhrmann spins the film, that character needs to have a substantial spine to keep it from flying apart, to make you realize what someone would risk everything for, and that spine can't be made of pixel-dust.
It's not there. Luhrmann provides substantial spectacle and very crowded frames with detailed evocation of the times, but the people caught in it cannot hold the thing together. It's just another variation of the theme. As such, it's an interesting, but not a great "Gatsby." Maybe—in another decade, after the book has aged a century—some entrepreneurial spirit, with hope and devotion in their eyes, will take on "Gatsby" and, rather than repeat, try to re-create the past and give us a truly great "Gatsby."
"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther...And then one fine morning--
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"The Great Gatsby"
** The 3-D also helps the special effects, which, in Luhrmann's vision have a distant postcard version of things and see quite a bit distanced from the real live action going on out front. In fact, I imagine the film looking pretty crummy in 2-D, especially in the shots where the large estates look like models (this was confirmed when I later saw it on television).
** “Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.”
"There are no second acts in American lives"
"Yours in Great Depression" During the Baz Age
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