Like all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books, The Great Gatsby was out of print when he died in 1941, at just 44, of a heart attack. The 1925 novel has since become enshrined as one of, if not the great American novel, its fine-cut romantic power undimmed by years of ham-fisted high-school essays on the symbolism of Gatsby’s blinking green light and Doctor Eckleburg’s all-seeing eyes. Doing the book justice on the big screen has been an equally protracted process. Baz Luhrmann’s 3-D version, which comes out May 10, will be the sixth movie adaptation in 87 years. The novel also has inspired a play, an opera, a musical, an experimental theater version set in an office, a graphic novel, a teen novel, a version with vampires, even a Nintendo game. But a lustrous definitive movie version feels like it would be the most fitting and generous memorial, given Fitzgerald’s own doomed excursions into the movie business. After years of toil in Hollywood, he died with only one screenplay credit. His mind was perhaps too elegant for the mass audience carpentry of screenwriting, his romanticism (and sobriety) too delicate. But one can take comfort that Fitzgerald’s fate has only added to the enduring appeal of Gatsby’s doomed trajectory, especially for moviemakers.
Courtesy of Warner Bros. (1); Getty (2); Everett Collection (1)
The first adaptation of Fitzgerald’s novel is long lost, alas, and only a trailer survives. Based on the Broadway play, this version coarsened the novel into a sensationalist tragedy. Posters for the film all emphasized the fatal love triangle, positioning Daisy between her husband and ex-lover Gatsby. Some taglines played to the women audience and hinted at a happy ending for Daisy: “What a woman did caused the death of the man she loved—and left a wake of mystifying incidents before happiness finally came.” Others, like the one shown, shamelessly implied it was tale of triumph: “Watch this great drama unfold to a tremendous climax until at last Jay can truly be called The Great Gatsby.” The JG monogram on Gatsby’s blazer breast pocket speaks volumes about the film’s oversize approach. After the Fitzgeralds saw a screening of it in Los Angeles, Zelda wrote her daughter saying, “It’s ROTTEN and awful and terrible and we left.” Reviews were not much more favorable. The New Jersey Telegraph complained that “nary a tear is spilled,” and The New York Times sniffed at the film’s widespread use of alcoholic beverages: “[The director] Mr. Brenon makes the most of these insidious stimulants, and even has the girls in a swimming pool snatching at cocktails, while they are swimming.” Liberty magazine was more receptive, especially to the antics of Lois Wilson as Daisy Buchanan: “Lois flashes silken hose to the knees, gets potted on cocktails, and wanders through the story with a contemplative eye upon matrimonial indiscretions. You are in for a shock.”
This version was tailored for its star, Alan Ladd, who like Gatsby was a boy from the Midwest (he grew up in Oklahoma City) who made himself over as a dapper tough guy. The elegant melancholy of the novel has been jacked up into noirish melodrama with bloody bullet holes, overwritten tough-guy dialogue, and a clunky framing device: Nick and Daisy visit Gatsby’s grave and muse aloud: “He seems like someone we knew in another time, another life, another world. Jazz, Prohibition, Flaming Youth...” Despite going back to the 1920s, the style of the film is firmly in the ’40s. Ladd was even pictured in a trench coat in the poster. The ending goes for shameless pathos by giving Gatsby a stirring change-of-heart speech just before he’s shot: “I’m going to pay up, Nick. I’m gonna square myself...I’ll live right here until the cops find that car. And if they don’t find it, I’ll call ’em. I owe that to a kid named Jimmy Gatz. Me, Nick, Me!”
This deluxe version was the brainchild of legendary producer Robert Evans. While star-studded and opulent, it is also tasteful to a fault and strangely lacking in spark. Roger Ebert called it “a superficially beautiful hunk of a movie.” Robert Redford, then at the peak of his fame, would seem to be perfect casting for Gatsby, but on reflection, one finds the star’s gorgeous surface tends to hide a tantalizingly self-sufficiency, the complete opposite of Gatsby, who should never quite feel happy in his own skin. There is also a dreaded lack of chemistry with Mia Farrow, rather wildly miscast as Daisy. The lovers don’t even face each other in the poster. None of that, however, deterred the studio from selling it as a Jazz Age version of Redford’s recent hit The Way We Were: “Gone is the romance that was so divine,” said the tagline. Tennessee Williams was a keen admirer of this version, saying it “even surpassed, I think, the novel by Scott Fitzgerald.”
Probably the most reverent adaptation of the novel, this TV movie uses a lot of the prose as Nick Carraway’s voiceover. Still, despite committed work all around, it feels like a study aid for high-school students. The spectacle of lavish decadence is limited by the TV budget, and again, the casting proves the biggest hurdle. Italian-American Mira Sorvino as airborne WASP goddess Daisy? Paul Rudd as literary dreamer Nick Carraway? It has all the makings of a great Saturday Night Live sketch. Toby Stephens, a Brit, offers a harsher take on Gatsby, and a flashback makes his criminal past completely explicit. In short, faithful if not particularly resonant.
Prohibition gangster goes gangsta for G, a sublimely hilarious hip-hop version. The poster art puts aside any critiques of the American Dream to fully embrace both materialism and the heat of adulterous desire. Smoke wafts up from a golden letter G...which stands not for Gatsby, incidentally, but Summer G (Richard T. Jones), the goateed music mogul who buys a house in the Hamptons to be next to married beauty Sky Hightower (i.e., Daisy Buchanan, played by Chenoa Maxwell). Instead of monogrammed shirts and cufflinks, Summer wears flashy earrings and a G medallion around his neck. Most of Fitzgerald’s dialogue has been updated with suitably camp results: “You’ll always be a broke ghetto wannabe.” “If you ever touch my sister again, I’ll stab you in the dick with a plastic spoon.” For added distraction, Bubbles from The Wire (a.k.a. actor Andre Royo) plays the Nick Carraway figure.
The Korean comedy Great Catsby (sic) started life as a graphic novel before being turned into a TV series. The story effectively starts with the backstory of the novel: kookie beauty Persu dumps young Catsby for not having a job and goes off with an older and richer man. But as the poster shows, the tragic love triangle has been totally sanitized into a jolly romantic comedy. Daisy is still pictured between her two beaux, but they all look spectacularly happy about it. The only connection with the original novel here is that the Gatsby figure (played by hip-hop singer MC Mong) wears a fine pink shirt.
Judging by the trailers, Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan, promises to be the most spectacular yet, and perhaps the most thematically commensurate too. Luhrmann recently told reporters he was inspired to adapt the novel because of its overpowering sense of loss, and because of its contemporary resonance. “In that moment before the financial crisis of 2008, I remember thinking that something wasn’t quite right. The greed and wealth were very reminiscent of The Great Gatsby. I thought, ‘The time is right to make this film.’” Back in 1971, Fitzgerald’s daughter Scottie Fitzgerald Smith addressed the enduring appeal of the novel in an essay for Family Circle entitled “Notes About My Now-Famous Father.” “I suspect the whole thing stems from a gigantic, collective national guilt that has been growing on us ever since we lost our chance to stay idealistic after World War II. Secretly, we know that somewhere we’ve gone astray, that what began as the most exciting experiment in history has lost some of its momentum and its brightest dreams.”
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Picture
