Gatsby le magnifique

Nowadays, at least from mentions I've seen, 1974's The Great Gatsby is somehow considered a classic. I benefit from having been alive back then and sitting through it in the theater - twice.

When my friend returned from Poland, he wanted to see it. So I went again, reluctantly. When he heard Mia Farrow's shrill voice call "Ni-ick," he said, "0h my God." That about sums it up.

When the character of Nick Carraway, played by Sam Waterston, steals the show, you've got a problem. He was wonderful.

While the film was very pretty to look at, with cinematography by Douglas Slocombe, The Great Gatsby was not a very good movie. It is slow, plodding, and miscast, with none of the lyricism of Fitzgerald's prose present.

Redford is a reserved, passionless Gatsby, and has no chemistry with the whiny Farrow. According to a book I read on the filming, director Jack Clayton chose Farrow because he liked the way she held a glass of champagne. And there we are.

There's no angst, just some pretty scenes, and in the end, one wonders if this is perhaps a book that doesn't adapt well.

This lavish Hollywood treatment of the Classic F. Scott Fitzgerald novel is a visual and acoustic delight. Nelson Riddle's spellbinding score and the many brilliant camera shots capturing the splendor of an age of excesses and indulgences make for engaging entertainment. Still, the dark story will leave the viewer numb at the eventual (bitter) end. A young Mia Farrow and Robert Redford in the leads, along with excellent performances by Scott Wilson and Bruce Dern, as well as the 70s "femme fatal" staple Karen Black round out the top, with what seems to be hundreds of colorful "flapper" and servant extras in the cast. Everyone fortunate enough to be born or married or mistressed into money is living the "life", not caring about anyone and anything other than fun, fun, fun.

A series of indiscretions (by just about everyone) culminates in the "just desserts", and several deaths. The fact that life of the high and mighty seems to go on without skipping a beat, regardless of anyone's recklessness or involvement, is the tough lesson the author seems to aim for. Without conscience, what have we? All the money will not replace human emotions, though the cash seems to easily take their place. But didn't we have fun....

Well,it is by now the best version of Gatsby,and I've seen three of the total four(all except the 1926 version,anyway unobtainable today). I think this one came closest to the original novel,yet much different from the original Fitzgerald novel-which,by the way is one of the best,if not the absolute best American novel ever to be written. The settings,music,original quotes,the acting are accurate only up to a certain point,a careful viewer discovering many inaccurate details if the film is compared to the book-Bruce Dern doesn't resemble Tom Buchanan at all,the actual Tom Buchanan being either a hulking brute(Oliver Reed or James Garner fitting much more accurately into that description,with their animal,macho-like physical structure,Reed's character from Women in Love even being a rich heir and playboy,a careless,spoiled,selfish,snobbish,hollowly narrow-minded and depraved bully)or an inexpressively beautiful all-American WASP,the cute,unimaginative,well-educated,dull,and again snobbish boy next door(even Redford could have been more convincing as Tom Buchanan:both more convincing as Dern and more convincing than his performance of Gatsby),Gatsby's Rolls-Royce couldn't have been a 1922 car because in the film we see a Rolls-Royce Corniche from 1925,actually the events even take place in 1925,not in 1922 like in the book,since eight,not five years have elapsed since Gatsby's first date with Daisy back in 1917,Gatsby's house isn't the like the one depicted in the book,certainly not the copy of an old castle from the Normandie(for example Hearst Ranch,which stood as a model both for Fitzgerald as he described Gatsby's home and for Citizen Kane's Xanadu)would have been a good choice,Daisy's hair is not blonde but dark,while Jordan Baker actually is blond,while she isn't blond in this film.... and the list of mistaken details might continue. Nevertheless,in spite of all the flaws mentioned above,the film still captures the enthralling beauty of the roaring twenties,being visually lush-the rich colors,textures,images used are so lavish,so lush,so intense that they almost seem disturbing.The costumes are stylish and extravagantly elegant,the music is authentic jazz and makes you want to get up and dance the Charleston. But some of the actors are clearly miscast,including Redford in the title role(which he even copies two decades later in Indecent Proposal,where he appears as an unhappy,mysterious billionaire craving to re-live the love lost in his shady past and willing to pay every price for it,thinking that his money and power could buy anything and anyone).Robert Redford does a fairly good job as Gatsby,but is clearly not the best choice.Gatsby is actually more mysterious than the athletic sunny-boy Redford,maybe not even handsome,however far more charismatic,expressive,even more eccentric. Probably the only actor I could imagine as Gatsby would be Richard Chamberlain,which played the best version of The Count of Monte Cristo the same year and by far the most credible Fitzgerald biopic in the following year-Gatsby is actually a sort of Monte Cristo who reinvents himself,assumes a new name/identity,acquires and spends an immense fortune both to reconquer his lost love and to come to terms with his past.Gatsby could have been depicted in a darker way,as he made his Fortune by using shady means during Prohibition("he killed a man"...or more),an elegant character exhaling a somewhat impure,demonic,oddly compelling fascination,manipulating and vindictive,seducing,twisting everything he touches. While Mia Farrow's performance as Daisy lacks originality,style,beauty,chemistry,just about everything.It's incredible that among so many actresses contemporary to her who depicted the twenties's flapper in a convincing way-Laura Antonelli,Susan Hampshire,Julie Andrews,Brigitte Bardot,Karen Black,Glenda Jackson,Liza Minelli,Lois Chiles,Natalie Wood,Faye Dunaway(the last one unjust deprived of this part in this very movie)she was the best choice.However there is something that Mia Farrow does excellently in her portrayal of Daisy-she looks extremely superficial,careless,vapid,insensitively spoiled and incapable of being serious or reasonable for one single second. The supporting cast on the other hand somewhat balances the film's flaws:Sam Waterson is credible as a mature,reliable,discreet,modest,intelligent,trustworthy Nick Carraway,just like in the book,Karen Black and Lois Chiles are also fitting well into their roles,while Scott Wilson as the mentally troubled,yet pure husband of Tom's mistress,plays his haunting part so well,that he somewhat resembles Peter Seller's genius to depict haunting,neurotic characters(Sellers would have been right for this part too). All in all this film is pleasant to watch and entertaining,but not Jack Clayton's ultimate masterpiece-is first watched it I was seduced by its visual splendor,watching it several times again,it gradually lost the magic I remembered.

Looking as if it were plucked from the dreaming ear of an impressionable adolescent with Fitzgerald's novel half-open on his bedstand -- and sometimes sounding, alas, as if it were scored by the guy who did episode #93 of Kojak -- there is no reason why this 1974 adaptation of The Great Gatsby shouldn't be better regarded than it is, or even included among other masterpieces of the fertile period. Well, maybe one: Mia Farrow gives an execrable, vaporish performance as Daisy Buchanan that will make you get down on your knees and thank god that we only have to deal with Gwyneth Paltrow. In a way, though, even Farrow's neuroting fits, because this is Fitzgerald as seen through a Tennesee Williams filter. The character of Myrtle's husband, a cipher in the book, is here a sweaty man in overalls who squeezes an oily rag in his hand whenever he stresses out over his wife's infidelities, which is pretty much all the time. What we film folk might call the Karl Malden character.

Unbeknownst to many, this movie was written by Francis Ford Coppola, and is another crown jewel to add to his annus mirabilis of 1974, when he also wrote and directed The Conversation and The Godfather Part II. And what did you do last year? Here he does a wonderfully subtle job with a thankless task, excising most of the celebrated prose passages and too-famous scenes. There's nothing worse than seeing desperate actors try to bring tension to overly familiar texts -- I can never stifle a groan when any actor says "To be or not to be" -- unless of course it's doing reverent voiceovers of Great American Literature. Both of these fatal errors are mostly avoided, but for anyone who wishes the movie were more faithful, they retain the scene where Daisy weeps over Gatsby's shirts. This episode has an intuitive poetic psychology in the book, but goes over like a lead balloon on screen because we expect clearer motivation from flesh and blood people. Such are the limitations of film. But to keep himself interested, and to prevent the proceedings from feeling too dutiful, Coppola gives strange, heretical tweaks to his notorious source throughout, including an assassination scene that likens Gatsby, brilliantly, to JFK.

I don't know much about director Jack Clayton, except that he also did an ace adaptation of Turn of the Screw, retitled The Innocents... But maybe that's enough. This guy FEELS literature. Nothing in this movie looks less than how you idealized it -- even the sunsets are Jazz Age. Robert Redford, too, perhaps sensing he was born to play this role, doesn't fold under pressure but gives a shrewdly understated performance to match the underwritten character, somehow keeping the myth of Gatsby alive despite his all-too-solid presence. In the scene where we first meet him in his office, his solitude framed by the noises of the revellers down in the garden, he projects both neediness and the intimidating force field that comes with extreme wealth, seemingly without doing anything.

A reviewer below me wondered why the men in this movie would go for the shrill, plain women, and suggested there was a gay subtext. Cool. Then the casting of Mia Farrow is subversive instead of insane. I have to admit, when Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway tells Gatsby "You're better than the whole lot of 'em put together!" his delivery has something, shall we say, flamboyant about it, especially in comparison to his wooden restraint hitherto. It's almost as if he stored up all his energy for that one line, to force us to see what a key moment it is between these two young men, and perhaps what's lost when Gatsby meets his end later the same afternoon. But enough speculation. Here's a movie open to any and all interpretations -- sexual, political, poetical.

It's funny how time seems to change attitudes towards many works of art, including the 1974 film treatment of Fitzgerald's novel "The Great Gatsby." At the time of its release the movie received some of the most scathingly negative reviews I can recall for any film. The reviews were no doubt a response to the enormous publicity that preceded the movie's release with promotion people at Paramount working overtime in promoting the movie as the finest film achievement since ""Gone With The Wind". Compared to the type of promotion that goes on today, this movie's promotion machine pales, but at the time it was quite a unique approach to marketing a movie. The film was on the cover of every imaginable magazine, including the very first issue of People magazine, and primed for failure from the start from all those in Hollywood who love to build something up only to revel in it being destroyed.

None of this back story had anything to do with the actual movie itself.

I recall seeing the movie on the first weekend of its opening and being utterly enchanted by the performances, costumes and ambiance of the production. I saw the movie a second time a few weeks later, only to be disturbed by the cuts that were made to the film, no doubt as a result of that critical backlash. A number of scenes were shortened with one whole character, the Owl Man, played by Tom Ewell completely edited out of the film. These cuts became permanent, with the film today showing the evidence of the cuts by occasional abrupt traditions. I have never seen any version of the film that had these cuts restored.

Now, 36 years after it's release, the movie has undergone the type of reassessment that only time can provide with it being appreciated for the lovely film that it is. With the movie certainly on it's way to Blu-Ray, it's the right time to see these cuts restored to the film so that people can finally see the ENTIRE film as it was initially intended and not the film formed by the hostile criticism it received.