The Great Gatsby (1974)

 

Picture: C+     Sound: B-     Extras: D     Film: B

 

 

Jack Clayton was one of the name directors during the “angry young man” renaissance of the early 1960s, with films like Room at the Top (1959) with Lawrence Harvey.  Francis Coppola, still as active a writer as a director, managed to do a screenplay adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in between writing and directing the first two Godfather films and The Conversation.  The fact he could write anything else on top of that is impressive, but producer David Merrick and studio head Robert Evans got Clayton for what is his most commercially successful film.

 

Released in 1974, it was not as critically well-received, in part because critics did not get it.  There is also the crowd who takes the elitist “it is not like the/as good as the book” stance without really watching the film.  These people land up not having respect for the mediums of either film or print enough, so such short-cut no-brainer thinking is easily dismissed.

 

Robert Redford is in fine form as the title character, who is ultra-wealthy, kind, and somewhat isolated in his big house.  His neighbor (Sam Waterston) observes the famed neighbor so much, that he becomes the voice-over narrator of the film.  It is the 1920s high time, before the end of the decade brought The Great Depression on, and the people in the money are enjoying themselves the best they can.  This includes ladies who lunch (Mia Farrow, Lois Chiles) and all the gossip and happening thereof.  Daisy Buchanan (Farrow) is unaware that her husband Tom (Bruce Dern, in another great performance) is having an affair with the wife (Karen Black) of a local and somewhat depressed gas station owner (Scott Wilson) also unbeknownst to him.

 

Thinking he has everything under control, Tom has to suddenly deal with Gatsby’s interest in Daisy, which turns out to run deeper than Tom ever imagined.  The ignorance some have to other’s activities is mirrored by their attitude about poorer people.  It is also mirrored in Tom by his accepted racism, when early on; he discusses a book that everyone should read.  It warns of those “Black people overrunning Whites” if something is not “done” about it, but this is all form a man who has his own secrets to hide.

 

Coppola flushes out darkness that other adaptations would skip (like the previous theatrical film versions) or now would be candy-coated over.  Clayton is a great fit for this, knowing well how to direct with such realism without a second thought.  Perhaps the lack of romanticism and the proper restraint the filmmakers showed ultimately got critics to go into the direction too many of them did, but having even more heightened histrionics would have turned this film into a cartoon.  That is the way post-Spielberg, most filmmakers would have unmade this as a feature film.  Fortunately, the film holds up very well, especially thanks to an exceptional (and for real) all-start cast.

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image is soft at time, and also shows the grain of the stock at the time it was shot.  This is still a big improvement over the many awful TV prints that have been circulating of the film and hurt its reputation.  Cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, B.S.C., would take the look for this film he helped create and apply it to the wildly successful Indiana Jones films.  That look became one of the most commercially duplicated, but you can see it here in a serious, intelligent, adult film.  Depth comes through at times, and the money to produce the picture is definitely up there on the screen.

 

The new Dolby Digital 5.1 remix is not bad, though it can hardly disguise the age of the dialogue-based film.  However, the big bonus with this mix, versus the “restored” Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono of the original theatrical mono sound, is being able to hear the exceptional Nelson Riddle score and music work throughout.  The 5.1 mix makes dialogue clearer though, and ambient sounds are cleaner.  There are no extras, not even a trailer.

 

You will rarely see all this talent together in a film today, certainly not at this budget (which was still big for its time, but not hugely so) and the studios now would only hire all of these types of talent for some overblown commercial film about nothing too important.  More stars would love to do this kind of film, if only it was available to be in.  Even with some limits this critic will concede, this Great Gatsby is at least a minor classic of the Drama genre hat manages to tell its story without delving into Melodrama.  That is not easy.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo