THE GREAT GATSBY 1974

You pretty much know what you’re in for in this, the third screen adaptation of  F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic 1925 novel The Great Gatsby when the film begins with a series of loving, beautifully lit, perfectly framed, Architectural Digest-worthy shots of property and objects. Instead of a haunting rumination on romantic obsession as a means of recapturing the past, poetically framed by a bitter indictment of materialism, the American Dream, and the emotional recklessness of the rich; this is The Great Gatsby as told from the perspective of nostalgia fetish.

The Great Gatsby suffers a bit from a confused point of view. When the camera lens is trained on Gatsby's beautiful objects, I suspect we're supposed to respond to the hollow allure of materialism. Unfortunately, the images are so arrestingly beautiful that they invite audiences to ooh and ahh over their luster. In essence, to view the items from the acquisitive, money-enamored perspective of Daisy. A bit of a problem, given that she is one of the more superficial and morally corrupt characters in the film.

In this Jack Clayton directed (The Innocents, Room at the Top) adaptation of an overly-reverential screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola, the unrequited love affair between Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan takes a back seat to the love affair the camera has with all the 1920s Art Deco knickknacks, gimcracks, and gewgaws on display throughout. This The Great Gatsby is a fashionista’s orgy of breathtaking period costuming, a production designer’s wet dream of glittering Jazz Age opulence, and an antiquities museum curator’s idea of a motion picture. Lovely to look at, yet emotionally arid, antiseptic, and hermetically sealed.

Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby

Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan

Bruce Dern as Tom Buchanan

Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway

Karen Black as Myrtle Wilson

Lois Chiles as Jordan Baker

Miscast, misguided, and overproduced (the latter an odd thing to say about a movie that revels in the excesses of the wealthy). That this film ranks at all amongst my picks of memorable movies to write about for this blog is largely due to The Great Gatsby being one of my top, all-time favorite novels, and this version being a particularly faithful big-screen adaptation. Painstakingly so, in fact. Indeed, the paradox of this nearly $7 million mounting of The Great Gatsby is how it is able to faithfully replicate so many intricate details of the novel (including sizable chunks of dialog and virtually the entirety of the book's events and characters) while still managing somehow to leave out both the book's passion and its pathos. It’s like one of those lifelike celebrity waxworks at Madame Tussauds: identical in every superficial detail, but falling short of being a true representation of life because it lacks a soul.

How this came to be can perhaps be traced to the film’s troubled genesis, recounted in fascinating detail in Bruce Bahrenburg’s book, Filming The Great Gatsby (my own yellowed and tattered copy, purchased in the heat of 1974’s studio-generated “Gatsby Fever”). Originally conceived and developed as a wedding present vehicle for Ali MacGraw by then-husband Robert Evans, The Great Gatsby was derailed when MacGraw threw a gold-plated, 14-carat monkey wrench into the works by falling in love with her The Getaway co-star, Steve McQueen. While the hunt went out for a new Daisy (in which several credible applicants like Faye Dunaway and Candice Bergen were passed over for, in my opinion, the absolutely incredible choice of Mia Farrow), an ailing Truman Capote was fired as screenwriter and later sued the studio. Meanwhile, the beautiful but inexpressive Lois Chiles was entrusted with the showy role of Jordan Baker simply because she was the girlfriend of the cuckolded Robert Evans, and studio head Charles Bluhdorn figured the poor guy needed to catch a break.

Daisy & Gatsby
Mia Farrow (absolute perfection in Rosemary's Baby) is an actress I greatly admire, but for me, she was totally out of her depth as Daisy Buchanan. Lacking the ability of say, Julie Christie, who can somehow play shallow and self-absorbed as interesting and sympathetic, Farrow's Daisy is mostly annoyingly fey and shrill. To be fair, F.Scott Fitzgerald's daughter, Frances, told People magazine at the time, "Mia Farrow looks like the Daisy my father had in mind." However, this was said during the filming. I've no idea what she thought after seeing the finished product.

Most movies have tortuous paths to completion, but The Great Gatsby is one of those films that gives the appearance of an inordinate amount of time and energy being spent on engineering a marketable property, not making a film. We still have the basic story of the millionaire with the shady past who attempts to reignite an old love affair with the socialite who threw him over years ago when he was poor, but that's almost all we have. Very little of what can be deemed effective is done with the novel's themes involving class, idealized romance, and morality.
One rarely gets the sense that anyone involved in the making of The Great Gatsby had even read the novel, much less understood any of what Fitzgerald was trying to say about the corrupting allure of the shiny side of the American Dream. Had more than a few seconds of thought been afforded these concerns, surely someone would have noted the contradiction inherent in making an ostentatious, large-scale behemoth about the pernicious vulgarity of the rich. I have a hunch that Paramount, in having made a fortune with Erich Segal’s Love Story, merely saw Fitzgerald's book as a "great romance." I'm sure it was their hope to combine the crowd-pleasing romanticism of Love Story (1970) with the moneymaking, sentimentalized nostalgia of The Way We Were (1973), and never gave a thought to much else.

Hype Gripe
The amount of publicity surrounding the release of The Great Gatsby was near-suffocating and ultimately off-putting to the public. In 1974 Warner Bros had Mame waiting in the wings, while  Paramount had Gatsby as well as Chinatown. The entire country was swept up in a nostalgia craze that even the decade's eventual disco fever couldn't quell.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

For all my complaining about what a prefab piece of Hollywood machinery The Great Gatsby turned out to be, I nevertheless get quite a kick out of the film. This in spite of my not finding the film to be particularly good, yet feeling a certain attachment to it due to a few sentimental, Gatsby-esque reasons of my own. The pleasure I derive from watching The Great Gatsby these days is chiefly nostalgic in nature, and directly related to the memories I have of my sixteen-year-old self in 1974. Back then I was caught up in all things movie-related and willfully swept up in the Gatsby hype. I bought all the magazines containing Gatsby articles, purchased the soundtrack album, and dragged my family to see it several times. I did everything short of begging my mother to purchase and serve our meals on the limited-edition The Great Gatsby Corelle® dinnerware they sold at the local department store.

At that time, I hadn't yet read Fitzgerald’s novel, so I didn't have any expectations waiting to be dashed. Nevertheless, in spite of my enthusiasm (or perhaps, because of it) when the film finally opened, I was a bit underwhelmed. It was nothing like the moving romance I was expecting, but it was a great deal like a film adaptation of a campy, self-serious Harold Robbins novel. Then, as now, I find it a gorgeous film to look at, and with each passing year, I grow ever fonder of the old-fashioned movie magic of large crowds of extras, big sets, period detail, all accomplished with no CGI. But it's still a film whose every scene is haunted by the twin ghosts of what-could-have-been and unrealized potential.

A Fine Romance
If Gatsby and Daisy failed to sizzle for some audiences, their lack of heat is nothing compared to the non-romance of butch professional golfer Jordan Baker and Tony Perkins-esque narrator Nick Carraway. According to IMDB trivia, original screenwriter Truman Capote wrote Nick as a homosexual and Jordan as a lesbian. Sounds about right to me. 

My DVD of the film is a treasured guilty pleasure, but I can't help wishing it were otherwise. A consolation of sorts is that the joys I currently find in this surprisingly joyless movie (Gatsby’s parties look well-populated and busy, but not the least bit fun) are of the so-bad-it’s-good variety. I honestly could watch this film every day, yet I wouldn't recommend it to a soul. It's a very watchable, amiable kind of failure. One which yields new campy treasures and glaring misjudgments with each viewing.

A couple of examples:

Daisy’s hair. In her memoirs, Mia Farrow felt her performance was “undermined” by the unflattering wig she was forced to wear, claiming that for the duration, “(It) felt and looked like cotton candy.” Can’t disagree with her there.

The clothes fetish. I know everyone in this movie is supposed to be rich and can afford fancy garb, but this is one of those movies where all the clothes have that distracting “never been worn” look. This also applies to the never-lived-in sets and all those pristine automobiles on display. These cars are so drooled over by the camera that when Myrtle meets her end at the fender of Gatsby’s gorgeous yellow Rolls Royce, I'm tempted to think audiences were left in a moral quandary...were they upset by her grisly death, or because she left such a big, ugly dent in that perfectly lovely automobile?

Author Tom Wolfe: "I'll never forgive the 1974 version of 'The Great Gatsby,' which was the Fitzgerald novel as reinterpreted by the garment industry. Throughout the picture, Robert Redford wore white suits. They fitted so badly that every time he turned a corner there was an eighty-microsecond lag before they joined him."

PERFORMANCES

According to Roman Polanski, his dream casting of the role of Guy Woodhouse in Rosemary’s Baby would have been Robert Redford. Upon seeing the lack of chemistry displayed between Mia Farrow and Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby, I'm inclined to think he dodged a bullet there. Certainly the Clark Gable of the ’70s, Robert Redford is a strikingly handsome man (I could write a sonnet about the way the sun hits the blond fur on his upper thighs in his swimsuit scene); but he is woefully stiff and colorless as Gatsby. It’s unimaginable that anyone this bland could harbor an obsessed fixation on anything other than perhaps Miracle Whip.

Most of the acting in The Great Gatsby falls into one of two categories: stiff or fussy. As garage owner George Wilson, actor Scott Wilson (so good in In Cold Blood) somehow manages to combine both as he's allowed to go through the entire film with the exact same watery-eyed, self-pitying expression you see here. The exasperation expressed by wife Myrtle (Karen Black) is pretty much on par with my own.

By way of contrast, we have my personal 70s fave, Karen Black, giving what can most charitably be described as a ridiculous performance as 20s hotbox, Myrtle Wilson. Karen Black won a Golden Globe for it, so perhaps it’s just a matter of taste, but I don’t believe her Myrtle for a minute…which is not the same thing as saying that I don’t love her performance. Acting her ass off in an almost alarmingly mannered fashion, Black is terrible in that Patty Duke as Neely O’Hara way. And as such, she’s close to being the only life the film has. I'm not sure whose idea it was to make Myrtle so hapless (over the course of the film, Black falls down a flight of stairs, shoves her hand through a plate window, and suffers a rap across the mouth), but hers is a physical, black comedy performance (pun intended) very faithful to the idiosyncratic skills of the actress. Tone and tempo of the rest of the film be damned.

Actress Brooke Adams, (l.) who would star in 1978's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and actor Edward Herrmann (r.) who played FDR in the 1982 musical, Annie show up in bit parts as party guests in The Great Gatsby.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

There’s not a lot that Mia Farrow does right in The Great Gatsby, but there is one scene where she so completely nails it that it almost makes her being so poorly cast worthwhile. It’s the scene that takes place in the Buchanan household when everyone is sitting around the dinner table complaining about the heat (taking place over the course of one summer, everybody sweats a lot in this movie…from the neck up, anyway. No one’s clothes are ever damp). In this scene, Daisy forgets herself and speaks to Gatsby as though the others aren't there. “Ah, you look so cool. You always look so cool,” she says dreamily. Catching herself, she blushes and starts to rattle off a nonsense explanation that hilariously trails off to nowhere. Farrow seriously knocks that little bit of business out of the park. It’s the single most authentically character-based acting she does in the film, and she’s great. In that one minute, I can see what kind of woman Daisy was perhaps supposed to be all along.

Very Pretty People Capable of Very Ugly Things

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Trusting a sensitive book like The Great Gatsby to an industry comprised of individuals who wouldn't recognize a moral imperative if it tapped them on the shoulder and asked if it could park their Hummers for them, is a little like asking Donald Trump to act like a human being for five minutes: the desire may be there, but the tools to pull it off aren't.

This version of The Great Gatsby is almost valueless as drama, but it's the perfect kind of screen adaptation of a literary classic for showing in high school English Classes. For while it is a faithful visual representation of the body of the text, at no time does the film tip its hand toward revealing what the novel’s underlying themes are, leaving students free to discuss amongst themselves.

Toned, tanned, & terrific, beefcake Redford provides a glimpse of what is 
so great about this particular Gatsby.

Because in my heart I consider The Great Gatsby to be a book of ideas and moral concepts poetically dramatized, I have my doubts as to whether it’s the kind of book that will ever lend itself to a satisfying screen adaptation. I must say I’m intrigued by the little I've seen of Baz Luhrmann’s forthcoming adaptation (although I'm not sure if I'm up for another one of Tobey Maguire's stare-a-thon roles). Its considerable visual dazzle once again raises the issue of whether or not it is possible for a film to simultaneously condemn and chronicle extreme wealth. If not, I guess we'll be left with another example of the past repeating itself...in 3-D, no less.

Gatsby reaches out toward the light at the end of Daisy's dock.

Nick: “You can’t repeat the past.”

Gatsby: “You can’t repeat the past? Of course you can.”

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2013

REFLECTIONS OF MURDER 1974

Like most people my age (never mind), I harbor fond memories of that boom product of early '70s television that was the "made-for-TV-movie." Specifically, The ABC Movie of the Week series. For kids too young to experience firsthand the often "R"-rated revolution in cinema that was exploding on movie theater screens across the country, The ABC Movie of the Week offered a somewhat toned-down, parent-sanctioned taste of just what the New Hollywood was all about. Anti-heroes, counterculture politics, sexual liberation, violence, and the phenomenon of the  unhappy ending were gently ushered into American households thanks to the '70s TV movie.

Though many of these 90-minute or two-hour films were cheesy and interchangeable "B-movies" offering steady employment to marginal TV actors and not-ready-to-retire stars of yesteryear, an exceptional few were surprisingly accomplished motion pictures equal to and exceeding their theatrical counterparts.

It's not my intention to broaden the scope of this blog to include TV movies, but in any realistic examination of films that have been "the stuff that dreams are made of" in my life; there's no way I could not acknowledge this rarely seen, probably-forgotten, little masterpiece from the director of Saturday Night Fever.  

Tuesday Weld as Vicky

Joan Hackett as Claire Elliott

Sam Waterston as Michael Elliott

Lance Kerwin as Chip

John Badham's  Reflections of Murder premiered on The ABC Movie of the Week in November of 1974 and simply floored me. I couldn't believe that this unsettling and atmospherically creepy thriller wasn't a feature film released to theaters. The splendid performances, sensitive characterizations, and deft handling of suspense were far more sophisticated than what I had come to expect from television films. Wasting no time in setting the cunning narrative into motion, the film nevertheless manages to carve out incisive moments wherein the relationships between the unconventional characters are explored and delineated.

The plot: The wife (Hackett) and mistress (Weld) of an abusive headmaster at a boy's school (Waterston) conspire to murder him and have his body discovered in a manner suggesting accidental drowning. Things swiftly go awry when the body fails to materialize and the presumed-dead man is not only observed around town by others, but possibly baiting the would-be-murderesses in a revenge plot of his own.

Claire: "Well, I can't do it and I won't!"
Vicky: "You will surprise yourself."

Those familiar with the work of French director Henri-Georges Clouzot will recognize Reflections of Murder as an updated remake of his influential 1955 French thriller, Les Diaboliques. I hadn't seen that classic film at the time, so the twists and turns of plot that were undoubtedly familiar to some took me completely by surprise. Understatement. I was devastated. I didn't see ANY of that coming and the shock of it blew me away.  Even with the annoyance of commercial interruptions, Reflections of Murder (a truly terrible, lazy, meaningless title that sounds like one of those straight-to-DVD sex thrillers of the '90s) was one of the most effective suspense thrillers I'd seen since Rosemary's Baby and Wait Until Dark. Even now, after having seen the Clouzot original many times and loving it as I do, Reflections of Murder still remains my favorite adaptation of the source novel, Celle qui n'était Plus by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (the authors of the novel upon which Alfred Hitchcock based his film, Vertigo).  

"I fear for my life when you two sit down together."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Subtext, intentional or otherwise, is often one of those things that can make the difference between a film being one that's merely entertaining to one that you never forget. In Reflections of Murder the unlikely friendship between a wife and a mistress—which, in the French context, had a decadent, continental air—takes on a tone both sinister and dangerously sexy when viewed from the American perspective which, as a rule, tends to be less forgiving of the husband/mistress arrangement.

There's an empathetic intimacy shared by the wife and mistress, notably absent from the film's male/female encounters, that fuels a subtle lesbian subtext (exploited to tedious effect in the abysmal 1996 Sharon Stone remake). Reflecting the times, a women's lib subtext is introduced in that, save for the sweetly doting attentions of a serious-faced student (Lance Kerwin), the school's all-male faculty and student body consistently relate to Vicky and Claire in scornful or sexualized terms. In the face of both physical and emotional abuse, Vicky & Claire's homicidal solidarity looks like feminist survival.

PERFORMANCES

An actress arguably more famous for the high-profile roles she's turned down ( Lolita and Bonnie & Clyde, to name a few) than the films she's made,  I can't recall ever paying much attention to Tuesday Weld before this film. In fact, in looking over a list of her early credits: Sex Kittens Go to College, Bachelor Flat, I'll Take Sweden, it's more likely I avoided her. But I fell in love with her in Reflections of Murder. And it's not because she looks so terrific with that fetching short haircut. She gives an assured performance that plays on so many levels of manipulation and unanticipated forcefulness that you are no more sure of her motives than the characters in the film. I've since grown into a genuine respect for her talent and number her among my favorite actresses...although I don't always "get" her choices in roles.

Tuesday Weld, Roman Polanski's original choice to star in his horror classic Rosemary's Baby, sports a short haircut in Reflections of Murder that provides a curious glimpse of what the actress might have looked like in the role that made Mia Farrow a star.

And then there is the late Joan Hackett. From the time I first saw her in The Group (1966) she has always impressed me with the gentle, fragile vulnerability she brought to her roles. Forgetting that she was also a very gifted comedienne (Support Your Local Sheriff), studios unfortunately tended to type her as a victim. Here she gives what I consider one of her best performances, her trademark hesitations and nervous, darting movements a perfect foil to Weld's steely efficiency. Maybe it's because of their diverse acting styles, but Weld and Hackett's scenes together are really electric. They are so good that they drive each scene exclusively with the intensity of emotional interaction; you almost forget they're setting the serpentine plot along its course.

Vicky: "Why am I suddenly the enemy?"
Claire: "You're not suddenly...you always were."

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
During its final act, Reflections of Murder may ultimately tip its hat to the genre conventions of deserted mansion, diaphanous bedgown, and a night full of thunder and lightning, but preceding that, the film has made moodily picturesque use of the lushly dank forests and overcast skies of the Puget Sound area of Washington. Damp, fallen leaves carpet every surface and the skies themselves seem to be burdened with an ominous, oppressive weight. The all-important water motif is echoed in the island locale, the ceaseless drizzle, the murky pools of standing water, and the haunting musical score (an adaptation of Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavichord) that eerily recalls trickling rain.

 THE STUFF OF DREAMS

As previous posts have asserted, I think I'm drawn to scary and suspenseful movies for the thrills. But if the film is somehow also able to capture a sense or tragedy and emotional loss, they usually have me in their hip pocket before the end credits. Reflections of Murder is a masterfully crafted thriller, certainly among the best I've ever seen, but it's the care given the depiction of the relationships that lends the film distinction. To me, the power of the dramatic denouement is not due to mere surprise, but the heartrending preceding sequence where Chip, the aforementioned  serious-faced little boy, expresses to Claire the depth of sorrow he would feel should anything happen to her. Not a time goes by when I can ever watch that scene with dry eyes. 

The scenes between Lance Kerwin (James at 15) and Joan Hackett provide the film with a touching humanity that make the chilling circumstances of plot more than just mystery/suspense fodder

I've read that a DVD release of Reflections of Murder has been held up in a rights and licensing battle, so, for the time being, I have to content myself with my murky VHS copy. I've been told, however, that there exists a copy available for viewing on YouTube. If so, it would well be worth your while to give it a look. It's the kind of taut, finely executed thriller rarely seen these days. A real killer.

Copyright © Ken Anderson