Twice As 'Great'

2
Oscar awards won by the 1974 "Great Gatsby" movie: to Theoni V. Aldredge for Best Costume Design, and to Nelson Riddle for Best Music, Scoring Original Song Score and/or Adaptation.

Nope, no Best Actress or Best Supporting Actor. But the acting overall was probably a bit better than I gave it credit for in the last post -- it's just that mortal human beings, even extraordinarily talented actors, are trying to do the impossible in playing all-time great literary characters. If you love a book, you have an image of the characters in your head, and they're probably not concrete enough for anybody to reenact -- they are great on an unrealistic level. Here in the material world, they can't be imitated.

So now that I'm in kinder, gentler mode, here are some things the movie did very well:

• Gatsby meets the Buchanan children -- This was a part that Robert Redford nailed. In fact, Redford may have conveyed this part better than the book did. When Gatsby is over at the Buchanan home, he's almost paralyzed when he sees their children. He's been so positive that Daisy's last five years are a mistake she can undo, no problem. The kids spell it out that it's not possible -- something real and irreversible has happened.
  
• The Valley of the Ashes -- Visually, the movie got more right than wrong. Among my favorite scenes was the Valley of the Ashes, the desolate place between West Egg and the City, where Wilson's garage is under the constant gaze of T.J. Eckelberg. It's powerful, and brings out the Wilsons' personalities -- Myrtle's disgust with her home and husband; George and his completely defeated personality. So, like, where is this place in real life? Some part of Queens? Did any part of Long Island actually look like that in the 1920s?
  
• Great Self-Restraint -- I respect the fact that they didn't work in the book's final paragraph. Why bother? It's such a masterpiece of the written word that it's going to be cheapened by inclusion in the movie, either through narration, or worse, through character dialogue. I hold to what I said before -- having the characters say some of the book's best lines in dialogue was cringe-inducing. Those of us who love the book know the ending almost word-for-word. For a movie adaptation, it was best left unsaid.
  

Laying an East Egg

4
Number of times I've read The Great Gatsby.

17
Years since I first read The Great Gatsby.

2
Newport, Rhode Island mansions, Rosecliff and Marble House, were used for Gatsby's mansion in Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 Gatsby movie, which I saw yesterday for the first time.

I'd been warned that the movie was a letdown, and for all these years, I feared seeing an inferior movie version of it. When is the movie adaptation of a great book every any good? I now wonder more than ever. Part of the problem is that I've had these great characters in my imagination for almost 20 years -- there are very few real-life actors who can live up to the mental image of great literary characters. Robert Redford can't do it as Gatsby -- I pictured Gatsby as being larger-than-life; he seems sort of desperate in most of the movie. Mia Farrow can't do it as Daisy Buchanan -- I pictured Daisy as being fake but irresistible; Farrow's version is pretty resistible. Was the book-version Nick Carroway really such a vanilla, spineless, eternal third-wheel? (George Wilson? Yes. Nick Carroway -- ehhhhh, c'mon now!)

The best acting in the movie, I think, was from the two supporting women. Karen Black made a pretty good Myrtle Wilson (Tom Buchanan's strumpet), and I really liked Lois Chiles as Jordan Baker, Carroway's sort-of girlfriend. She's hot, rich and dangerous -- if only the movie Carroway had some personality, there may have been at least some mild chemistry between them, as I thought existed in the book. BTW, check out Karen Black's and Lois Chiles' IMDB sites -- neither has been hurting for quantity of acting gigs in the 3+ decades since Gatsby.

While there's little alternative, it's cringe-inducing to see movie characters drop bastardized versions of great Fitzgerald lines into casual conversation. "Can you imagine what this island must have looked like to those Dutch explorers, Gatsby?"

The movie's high-budget-ness is actually its best part. It's fun to see grandiose-scale renditions of Roaring Twenties parties. Just like reading Jurassic Park made you want to see the dinosaurs in movie form, so did the book make me want to see and hear a Gatsby party -- New York's partying crowd getting their bootleg drink on, grooving to the Charleston, slurring rumors about Gatsby. There are, at least, a few things that the medium of film can convey better.