I'm writing this a few days before the UK premiere of Baz Luhrmann's new film of The Great Gatsby – at which stage the broad consensus seems to be that the novel can't be filmed. Aside from a few midway-convincing theories about the impossibility of matching the beauty of Fitzgerald's line-by-line writing, most of this agreement is based on the fact that all previous attempts to bring the book to life have emerged stillborn.
Sadly, the very first effort, a 1926 silent movie directed by Herbert Brenon, is almost entirely lost. Or perhaps, not so sadly. When F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald went to see the film in Los Angeles, they walked out. Zelda wrote to her son Scottie: "We saw 'The Great Gatsby' in the movies. It's ROTTEN and awful and terrible and we left." (The capitals are Zelda's.) The New York Times reviewer presumably sat through the whole thing, but noted that the neither the director "nor the players have succeeded in fully developing the characters". Only one minute of the film – its trailer - now survives, which you can see for yourself:
Yes, they actually did run with the tagline: "The Great Gatsby is great!" I can't imagine that impressed anyone even back in 1926.
The next film version was a 1949 film noir, starring Alan Ladd and Betty Field. This one survived. Should you wish, you can currently watch the entire thing on YouTube:
I managed a painful nine minutes of clumsy exposition and verbose dialogue before I just couldn't take any more. Hardier souls than me have watched the entire thing and apparently it turns the story into a straightforward love story – between Jordan Baker and Nick Carraway!
Not the most dedicated criticism, I know. I have at least watched the entire 1974 version. Starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, written by Francis Ford Coppola and directed by the reliable Jack Clayton (now probably best remembered for his 1959 version of Room At The Top), this film certainly looks good on paper. On screen, however, it looks decidedly pastel. The weak, blanched colour scheme permeates everything. The parties, while lavish, are muted and bloodless. The action is slow and stilted. The actors … Well, Robert Redford is certainly handsome enough to play Gatsby. Bruce Dern has plenty of the thoughtless aggression necessary to play Tom. Sam Waterston is an excellent, quietly compassionate Nick Carraway. But none of them – not even Redford – sets the screen alight. Mia Farrow, meanwhile, is a disaster as Daisy. She seems hysterical, over-excited and her voice, which in the novel seems to Gatsby to be "full of money", is here just shrill.
As well as an uncharacteristically awful performance from Farrow, the film also produced one of Francis Ford Coppola's lowest moments in the 1970s. The 1949 version seems absurd because it so recklessly abandons Fitzgerald's sublime blueprint – but sticking to it doesn't seem to work either. Coppola's script treats the source novel with a kind of nervous awe. It doesn't just avoid altering small details, it includes many that just don't work on film. That famous scene at the end of the first chapter, where Nick sees Gatsby staring out to the green light by Daisy's house, is strange and haunting in the book, and passes in a flash: "But I didn't call to him for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone – he stretched out his arm towards the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling." In the film, it requires a long static shot – and an absurd moment where Redford does indeed move his hand in a weird way.
Similarly, we meet Daisy and Jordan in almost the exact same position in the film as in the book. Fitzgerald says:
"We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.
"The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon."
Sadly, the film makers couldn't quite manage the breeze (it blows the curtains in several directions). Nor do the windows look particularly like pale flags. Nor do the women float. In other words, the details are there, but none of the magic. Fitzgerald's prose just cannot be recreated on camera and attempts to do so (of which this film contains too many) are doomed to failure.
Even so, the 1974 version isn't quite as boring as plenty of critics have suggested. A few of the jokes are delivered well, there are some successful visual realisations (the cars, the valley of ashes, and TJ Eckleburg's famous eyes all look good), and odd scenes – notably that claustrophobic party in Myrtle's flat – are done well. But the resulting film is dry, slow and sterile, as the trailer ably demonstrates:
(In the 1974 film's defence, it is also worth registering Tennessee Williams' opinion, as recorded in his book Memoirs: "It seems to me that quite a few of my stories, as well as my one acts, would provide interesting and profitable material for the contemporary cinema, if committed to … such cinematic masters of direction as Jack Clayton, who made of The Great Gatsby a film that even surpassed, I think, the novel by Scott Fitzgerald." Erm … )
Finally, I did another 10-minute special on the 2000 TV version. This too struggled to recreate the French windows scene – and this too failed. No floating, no flags, no magic. The rest wasn't half so painful as the 1949 version, even if Daisy appeared oddly wooden, but it did still drag. Most offensive to my eye was that awful cleanness that blights many costume dramas. All the vintage clothes look brand new, the chairs have never been sat in and there's no grease or muck in poor old Wilson's garage. It doesn't look like life. You can see for yourself here.
In spite of these failures, and in spite of Australia, I haven't given up all hope for Luhrmann's version. I'm going to see it on Monday 20 May, and will provide some thoughts as quickly as possible after that. I promise to stay for longer than 10 minutes – and longer, in fact, than Scott and Zelda did when they went the 1926 film.
Until then, there is at least one reproduction of Gatsby that is definitely worth more of your time. This very silly Super Nintendo emulating version has already clocked up more than a million page visits, thanks to its winning combination of Fitzgerald's dialogue, killer flappers, dangerous chandeliers, and the ability to kill waiters by chucking your hat at them. Who says it can't be adapted?
