The Great Gatsby (1974) - Great cast wasted in poorly directed adaptation

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A very classy, deliciously designed poster for Jack Clayton's The Great Gatsby

A bond salesman, who lives in a small Long Island apartment, becomes taken by his loaded neighbor Jay Gatsby, and he spends a good part of one 1920s summer in Gatsby's and other rich people's company.

The Great Gatsby is written by Francis Ford Coppola (The Rain People (1969)), adapting the same-titled 1925 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned (1922)), and directed by Jack Clayton (Room at the Top (1959)).

The epochal novel is here transformed into a watered-down, boring, unreasonably long film. One presumption on the part of Clayton is that the grand party scenes are so lively and fascinating that we should just forget the characters and stare at the frivolities for large portions of time.

The four central characters are well-cast, and particularly Bruce Dern (The Big Town (1987)) is outstanding as the ornery bastard Tom Buchanan; but their experiences and feelings never really affect us as audiences. The costumes are lavish, but the direction here is more than dubious. In terms of cinematography The Great Gatsby has way too many zooms and travelings.

SPOILER The scenes of the last ten minutes, - the murder, meeting with Gatsby's father and the funeral, - are not bad, but they regrettably arrive at the end of a mess of a film.

 

Watch a trailer for the film here

 

Cost: 7 mil. $ 

Box office: 20.5 mil. $ (North America only)

= Box office success (returned 2.92 times its cost domestically alone)

[The Great Gatsby premiered 27 March (New York) and runs 146 minutes. Coppola replaced Truman Capote as screenwriter but later complained: "The script that I wrote did not get made." Shooting took place from June - September 1973 in Rhode Island, New York and England. The international gross numbers are regrettably not reported online, and so it is hard to say if its success was mostly an American occurrence. The film was nominated for 2 Oscars and won both: For Best Costumes and Score (Nelson Riddle). It also won 1/4 Golden Globe nominations and 3 BAFTAs. Roger Ebert gave the film a 2.5/4 star review, translating to a notch over this one. The-Numbers.com assert that the film has made a further 4.9 mil. $ on a 2013 Blu-ray release domestically. Clayton returned with Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983). Robert Redford (All Is Lost (2013)) returned in The Great Waldo Pepper (1975); Mia Farrow (Hurricane (1979)) in Peter Pan (1976, TV movie) and theatrically in The Haunting of Julia (1977). The Great Gatsby is rotten at 39 % with a 5.00/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of The Great Gatsby?