The Great Gatsby (1974) Movie Review, Cast & Crew, Film Summary

Jack Clayton’s filming of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous novel is hallowed as one of 1970s Hollywood’s most surprising and resounding critical flops, and although it was in fact a strong commercial success, its reputation has remained low ever since. The loud gong it rang with the cognoscenti was all the more surprising considering that it was armed with a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola at a time when he could do practically no wrong, his The Godfather Part II and The Conversation both coming out in the same year. Coppola had reportedly written his script in three weeks, for a project that had begun as Robert Evans’ brainchild intended for his then-lover Ali MacGraw: the previous screenwriter, Truman Capote, was sacked from the project because his draft recast Nick Carraway as gay. Coppola has stated that his version was also largely ignored, but whatever the case, the one used is both faithful to a fault and yet far off the point. The resulting film is not, unfortunately, ripe for reappraisal. It’s overlong, excessively languid, poorly staged, and far too preciously arty, all crimes especially when the beauty of Fitzgerald’s novel is its compressed, utterly assured, poetic directness. Gatsby is a work bound up in the novelistic structure Fitzgerald chose for it, the purposefully limiting, mediating voice of Carraway. Such mediation is always difficult, not to mention superfluous, when translated into cinema. This adaptation came amongst a small rash of films in the mid-’70s in which luminaries of New Wave Hollywood tackled American literary classics, also including the likes of John Schlesinger’s The Day of the Locust, Peter Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller (both 1975), and Elia Kazan’s The Last Tycoon (1976). Unlike Fred Nugent’s 1949 version, starring Alan Ladd, which essentially transmuted the material into something harsh and neurotic and not far from noir, Clayton’s Gatsby is all airy class and self-conscious spit-polish.

Inevitably, a sentimentally lacquered version of the efforts of shady millionaire Jay Gatsby (Robert Redford) to win over his idealised former flame Daisy Buchanan (Mia Farrow) from her more certifiably blueblood husband Tom, takes centre stage. Gatsby is the mysterious tycoon who buys a colossal mansion in the fashionable reaches of Long Island and throws parties that are flashpoints of all that’s transitory, gaudy, ebullient and ludicrous about Jazz Age America. Gatsby, kept off screen for a surprising length of time except in brief, menacingly silhouetted glimpses, gazing yearningly at the famous green light on the Buchanans’ dock, finally appears embodied by Redford at his most absurdly handsome. Playing a part like Gatsby was never going to be easy, but Redford is nominally well-cast as the self-made man with a high contrast between his expedient, grubby means of enriching himself and the almost mythic aspirations of his life, and he’s the chief reason the film hangs together, even if he’s not always up to making Fitzgerald’s elegantly stylised dialogue sound real. Redford at least manages to suggest both the faintly disquieting hardness of the man who has pulled off such things, and the unironic romanticism that drives him. Unfortunately, there’s no real meat for him to reach in terms of his characterisation, and the friendship between him and Carraway never comes alive.

Otherwise, now, as when the film came out, the least persuasive element of the film is the casting, including an awkwardly employed Bruce Dern as Tom Buchanan, who, in spite of playing the character’s smouldering frustration well, never feels like the kind of entitled, self-righteous yet morally hollow golden boy he’s supposed to be embodying; his being cast opposite Redford in such a role seems more about maintaining a clear division between leading and supporting actors. Sam Waterston, as Nick, is suitably reflective, but he’s also disturbingly drippy, and the subplot of his romance with Jordan Baker (an inert Lois Childs) becomes mere window dressing. Karen Black, as Myrtle Wilson, Tom’s low-class girlfriend, and especially Mia Farrow, are both cruelly handled and give excruciating performances that see them endlessly telegraphing “subtle” aspects, and twisting their faces up in garish caricatures. Daisy’s voice is supposed to sound like money. Farrow’s, in her archly affected, insipid acting, sounds like more tile grout.

Clayton, a serviceable but never thrilling director, had been the least interesting of the major British directors to emerge in the Free Cinema era with his film of Room at the Top (1958). His thumpingly literal-minded adaptation of “The Turn of the Screw”, The Innocents (1961), serves as some warning for what goes wrong here, with stilted, unimpressive attempts to recreate Jazz Age high-life, and a cinematic technique that possesses no flexibility at all, so that the film unfolds in a stagy, hermetic fashion, for all the cash thrown at it. Clayton’s witless, gallumphing visual metaphors, like the clock dial painted on the bottom of a pool through which pretty fish swim, and a glimpse of a spectral Daisy by Gatsby just before he’s shot, add nothing but a musty scent. Gatsby’s parties, which ought to be delirious and decadent, never look like anything other than awkward collectives of retro-clad actors. Clayton tries to limply sex proceedings up by gawking Charleston dancers at hip level as if it’s Saturday Night Fever gone jazz, and repeatedly glimpsed, apparently lesbian flappers who dress alike and dance together. Such are the limits of the film’s hopelessly aseptic sexuality. But there’s no sense of dramatic shape or outsized ebullience in the way that, say, Coppola’s own The Godfather’s wedding scenes radiated such contextual life. For a film that’s well over two hours, there’s a remarkable laziness to the explorations and even introductions of the supporting characters. Nelson Riddle’s music score is strangely flaccid, although it is worth noting that the fine version of “What’ll I Do?” played over the opening credits is sung by William “Pencilneck” Atherton.

It is, nonetheless, too good a story to foul up completely. That this Gatsby manages to remain watchable is partly because of, and partly in spite of, the visual grandeur, provided in images that seem to swim with the summer heat, by cinematographer Douglas Slocomb, but there’s also a dreadfully prolific use of zoom shots that do nothing to enliven the mise-en-scene. Something of the right elegiac tone is conveyed in the film’s middle third, in which past and present melt into each other for Gatsby and Daisy, and there’s a lengthy, effective slow-burn to the sequences in which the drama comes to a head, in the tense, then eruptive, and finally tragic succession of events that lead to Myrtle’s death after the triangular clash between Gatsby, Tom, and Daisy. But Clayton stumbles again with casting Stuart Wilson as Myrtle’s shambling idiot husband who finally kills Gatsby, believing him to be responsible for Myrtle’s death: Wilson seems too stupid, the tragedy is excessively anticipated, and the overall dramatic tone too cool and distended, for it to have much pathos and shock. The whole thing feels like the least inspired kind of television adaptation overstuffed with budgetary advantages. It’s worth noticing that in many ways Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In America (1984) is a far better version of Gatsby, certainly mustering a far more forceful and flavourful vision of class intransigence and art-deco opulence crashing headlong into each other. Most sadly, the film almost completely avoids the mythopoeic resonancs that Fitzgerald carefully wove throughout his story, and the reason why it’s a great novel. Far from a meditation on the American Dream, this film finishes up mired in nostalgia whilst failing to properly evoke it. The finale even bizarrely, unforgivably leaves out Fitzgerald’s final elegy in exchange for kicking off a perversely upbeat final rendition of “Ain’t We Got Fun?” over the end credits. This may have been intended to have the same sort of bracing effect that the mischievous strains of Charlie Kane’s theme had at the end of Welles’ epic, but it completely corrodes the intended final note instead, and it’s the sort of choice that leaves you with a feeling bordering on disgust.