Ever since F. Scott Fitzgerald’s magnum opus The Great Gatsby
was published, Hollywood has been fascinated with adapting his novel into a
film. To date, there have been five official versions, from a silent film made
in 1926 to Baz Luhrmann’s postmodern take in 2013. Filmmakers have long been
intrigued by the novel’s themes of decadence, excess and its portrait of the
Roaring Twenties, making it a haunting critique of the pursuit of the American
Dream.
In 1974, a particularly intriguing
version of The Great Gatsby was
released starring Robert Redford in the titular role and Mia Farrow as Daisy
Buchanan, the object of his affection. It was directed by British filmmaker
Jack Clayton and adapted by Francis Ford Coppola. The film received scathing
reviews and was nominated for several Academy Awards and Golden Globes – even
winning a few of them. It is generally regarded as an uneven adaptation at best
and an outright failure at worst but I’ve always found it a fascinating take on
Fitzgerald’s novel.
The opening credits play over
a montage of Gatsby’s opulent mansion that is oddly devoid of life, coming
across more as a sterile museum full of nice things: an expensive car, piano,
ornate furnishings, marble floors, and exquisite décor, all the while echoey
music plays as if to suggest ghosts of the past haunt this place. While the
camera lingers over expensive jewelry, it keeps returning to a newspaper
photograph and portraits of Daisy Buchanan (Farrow) – the only thing that
Gatsby really cares about.
We meet Nick Carraway (Sam Waterston) arriving in West Egg, Long Island via boat to spend the summer
hanging out with his cousin Daisy and her husband Tom (Bruce Dern) who live in
the far more fashionable East Egg, “drifting here and there, unrestfully,
wherever people played polo and were rich together,” Nick observes via
voiceover narration. He’s met by Tom and they head back to his house where he’s
reunited with Daisy and meets her friend Jordan Baker (Lois Chiles).
One is immediately struck by
Daisy’s flighty condescension and Tom’s smug superiority. These people live in
their own rarefied world because they can afford it. She even tries to appear
deep by making an observation about a bird on the lawn but it comes across as a
half-hearted attempt. The film wastes no time showing what a hypocrite Tom is
with his talk of the superiority of the rich, upper class and his polo games
but his mistress Myrtle (Karen Black) is the wife of a destitute mechanic
(Scott Wilson) living in a garage located among a desolate wasteland of ashes.
Nick arrives home and only
catches a fleeting glimpse of his enigmatic neighbor Jay Gatsby (Redford). The
film cheekily juxtaposes Nick’s simple existence – eating a modest steak dinner
he prepared himself with a glass of beer on the porch of his modest rental
house – dwarfed by the army of groundskeepers and caterers that prepare
Gatsby’s estate for one of his lavish parties. We only catch a couple of
glimpses of him until 35 minutes into the film when Nick is brought up to meet
the man one-on-one in the heart of his mansion. It is an impressive
introduction as Robert Redford flashes that high wattage movie star smile and
one can see why he was the ideal actor to play the enigmatic man with loads of
charisma.
Daisy and Gatsby have a
doomed love affair. When they first met they couldn’t be together because she
was rich and he wasn’t. This violated the rules of the upper class. Gatsby
spent years amassing a large personal fortune, buying his way back into Daisy’s
world in the hopes of proving himself worthy, only she didn’t wait for him and
married another rich man. They reunite for a brief affair, knowing it can’t
last but are determined to savor every moment they have together.
Bruce Dern does an exceptional
job of portraying an Alpha Male reeking of entitlement. He uses up people with
little to no thought of the consequences. Karen Black plays his ideal foil, an
equally duplicitous spouse that when she wants something, like a puppy being
sold on the side of the street, has Tom pay for it. The actress does a wonderful
job conveying Myrtle’s indulgence of excess. These aren’t very nice people and
Dern and Black aren’t afraid to portray them as such. And yet for all of her
vanity, Black gets a moment to suggest that Myrtle is something of a tragic
figure while Dern’s Tom is ultimately nothing more than a wealthy bully.
“They’re careless people, Tom and Daisy. They smash things up and then they
retreat back into their money or their vast carelessness…leaving other people
to clean up the mess,” Nick says of them, which perfectly nails their
characters.
Sam Waterston plays Nick as a
blank slate audience surrogate, acting as our guide among the rich and
powerful. The character’s purpose is to react to the behavior and actions of
the colorful people he encounters throughout the film. The actor does a decent
job portraying the wide-eyed outsider in a world he is familiar with but can
never truly be a part of because he’s not rich. As the film progresses, a
friendship forms between Nick and Gatsby and this gives Waterston something to
do other than being an observer. Nick is a true friend to Gatsby as he doesn’t
like him because of his money but because he truly admires him.
Robert Redford always struck
me as an actor that kept his cards close to the vest, never letting audiences
inside and showing a vulnerable side. It always feels like he keeps audiences
at arm’s length and in the process maintaining an air of mystery, which is
ideally suited for playing Gatsby. The actor portrays him as an elusive figure
that only interacts with people on his own terms.
If Redford is ideally cast as
Gatsby then Mia Farrow is very much miscast as Daisy. Her fickle,
bird-trapped-in-a-gilded-cage take on the character is grating at times and
makes us wonder why Gatsby is so taken with her. That being said, the scene
where Daisy and Gatsby meet for the first time in eight years demonstrates
incredible on-screen chemistry between the two actors. In particular, Redford’s
reaction to seeing her is quite powerful as we see Gatsby, a man always in
control, caught up in the moment – a rare thing that sees him letting his guard
down.
The Great Gatsby features beautiful cinematography courtesy of
Douglas Slocombe (Raiders of the Lost Ark)
and features memorable shots like that of Nick leaving the Buchanan’s at the
end of the day with the sky and water bathed in the warm orange, pink and
yellow hues of the sunset. The soft focus approach gives everything an almost
hazy look, making all the metal of the expensive silverware, glassware and
jewelry sparkle and shimmer.
For years, the likes of Sam
Spiegel, Ray Stark and Sydney Pollack had wanted to adapt F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby into a film. Actress
Ali MacGraw dreamed of playing the much-coveted role of Daisy Buchanan, which
prompted then-husband and head of production at Paramount Studios Robert Evans
to buy the film rights as a gift to her. He partnered with Broadway producer
David Merrick who was friends with Fitzgerald’s daughter Scottie. At the time
Merrick approached her there were other interested parties and it took him a
year before he closed the deal for $350,000.
Potential directors circled
the project, including Peter Bogdanovich, Arthur Penn and Mike Nichols, but
none of them wanted MacGraw to play Daisy. British director Jack Clayton was
hired to helm the film. He had actually tried to acquire the rights to The Great Gatsby himself in the 1940s
and was obsessed with the novel for 30 years. To this end, he not only
consulted with Fitzgerald estate curator Matthew J. Bruccoli but also with
Scottie and literary experts.
Evans hired Truman Capote to
write the screenplay. Clayton felt that the first draft had “far too much
dialogue and exposition.” Evans was also unhappy with the script, which
included confusing dream sequences and flashbacks. He asked Francis Ford
Coppola to write a more straight-forward adaptation. The filmmaker was looking
for a change of pace from working on The
Godfather (1972) and wrote the script in five weeks. Clayton loved
Coppola’s script and removed some passages he felt were unnecessary and
inserted material from the book that the filmmaker had not included. It was
these additions that upset Coppola, including an ending that he felt was
anti-climactic.
Evans wanted either Warren
Beatty or Jack Nicholson to play Gatsby with the former agreeing but only if
MacGraw played Jordan Baker, and the latter only if she was not cast as Daisy.
Evans was determined to have his wife play the role. He approached Marlon
Brando but couldn’t afford him, especially after The Godfather. They were two months away from the start of
principal photography and still hadn’t found their Gatsby. When Robert Redford
heard about the project he approached Evans who turned the actor down. Redford
met with Clayton who was interested in Nicholson as Gatsby but after talking
with Redford for 90 minutes wanted him to play the part. Clayton said of the
actor, “You can see the possibility of danger beneath the romantic WASP image.”
Evans still wasn’t convinced
and felt that Redford didn’t look the part, which drove the actor crazy: “I
began to think Evans never read the book. Sure, he liked the idea of doing
Fitzgerald, but he didn’t know the text.” He had first read the novel in
college and found it “florid,” but revisited it for the film and “I saw it was
something extraordinary, the depiction of human obsessions, and I felt some
great screen work could come from it.” The studio also backed Redford and he
was cast as Gatsby.
Merrick wanted MacGraw to
play Daisy and McQueen to play Gatsby. At the time, Evans and MacGraw were
getting divorced after he discovered she was having an affair with her co-star
on The Getaway (1972), Steve McQueen.
Evans, understandably, disagreed with Merrick and had Paramount executives meet
with him and Merrick to decide on potential actresses to play Daisy: Mia
Farrow, Katharine Ross, Candice Bergen or Faye Dunaway. Merrick continued to
insist on MacGraw while Clayton wanted Farrow and Evans agreed. The studio
executives concurred and she was cast in the role. After being cast she
discovered that she was pregnant. The shooting schedule was moved up a week and
her dresses were altered to hide her pregnancy.
Most people assume that the
media blitzkrieg and merchandising of a movie started with Star Wars (1977) but forget that The Great Gatsby predated it with a then-unprecedented amount of
hype as typified by Evans hubristically saying, “The making of a blockbuster is
the newest art form of the 20th century.” Oh, how prescient that
statement was when one considers the rise of the mass marketed studio
blockbuster in the 1980s. Paramount spent $200,000 on publicity and promotion
with product tie-ins valued at $6 million. The film was made for $6.4 million
and made $18.6 million on advance bookings making it a financial success before
it was even released in theaters!
Film critics
savaged The Great Gatsby when it was
released. Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half out of four stars and wrote,
“But we can’t penetrate the mystery of Gatsby. Nor, to be honest, can we quite
understand what’s so special about Daisy Buchanan. Not as she’s played by Mia
Farrow, all squeaks and narcissism and empty sophistication.” In his review for
The New York Times, Vincent Canby
wrote, “Nothing that Mr. Clayton does with the actors or with the camera comes
close to catching the spirit of Fitzgerald’s impatient brilliance…The plot has
been dismantled like an antique engine and photographed, piece by piece,
preserved in lots of pretty, glistening images that bath the film in nostalgia
as thick as axle grease.” Time magazine’s
Jay Cocks wrote, “A great deal of time, money and promotion have been
concentrated here, but Gatsby’s sad and curious history has resulted in a dull,
dreadful movie.” Finally, in his review for The
New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann wrote, “In sum this picture is a total
failure of every requisite sensibility. A long, slow, sickening bore.”
Redford said of the film,
“The truth is, Hollywood wanted to make The
Great Gatsby because it was a literary success, not because it was great
literature. Enough time may not have been taken to work that one out.” Coppola
hated the film and felt that Clayton had ruined his faithful script. Farrow
felt that it “was a victim of overhype.”
The Great Gatsby takes a fascinating look at the idle rich and
their decadent lives as typified by the people that populate Gatsby’s parties.
They are filled with people that want to see and be seen, lose their
inhibitions and indulge in all kinds of excesses – this was the Roaring
Twenties where the United States was prospering after World War I. And yet, the
film ultimately shows these parties as empty affairs that its host Gatsby
rarely attends. Why should we care about these people? When it comes to the likes
of Tom and Myrtle, we don’t and neither does Nick who becomes disgusted by them
and their phoniness, turning his back on their way of life.
As Nick observes early on,
Gatsby is a tragic and romantic figure: “For Gatsby turned out alright in the
end. It was what preyed on him, what foul dust that floated in the wake of his
dreams.” He’s a self-made man that built himself up to impress a woman he loved
years ago and never forgot. Unfortunately, he thought that money could buy
happiness and return things to the way they were once years ago, but this
proves to be his undoing. For its faults, this version of The Great Gatsby is remarkably faithful to its source material and
a strong indictment of the vanity of the rich and the dangers of achieving the
American Dream.
SOURCES
Callan, Michael Feeney. Robert Redford: The Biography. Vintage.
2012.
Phillips, Gene D. Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola.
University Press of Kentucky. 2004.
“Ready Or Not, Here Comes
Gatsby.” Time. March 18, 1974.
Sinyard, Neil. Jack Clayton. Manchester University
Press. 2013.
