THE GREAT GATSBY (1949)

The second attempt at filming the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic is a straightforward telling of renewed folly between rich former lovers Jay Gatsby: nouveau/unknowable, and Daisy Buchanan: refined/carelessly married, made shortly after the novel found belated favor.  (A 1926 silent, out soon after publication, has a tantalizing cast:  Warner Baxter, William Powell, Neil Hamilton, Georgia Hale, Lois Wilson, but presumed lost*; the high-profile 1974 remake a miscast swanky bore; Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 do-over a Baz Luhrmann film.)  This one very well cast: Alan Ladd, Betty Field, Ruth Hussey, Henry Hull, Macdonald Carey (an exceptional Nick Carraway), Howard De Silva, Shelley Winters, Ed Begley, Elisha Cook Jr., and Barry Sullivan (a Tom Buchanan Daisy could actually be attracted to), facelessly helmed by Elliot Nugent (even great lenser John F. Seitz unable to help) and gets off to a disastrous start with clips of Gatsby in gangster mode.  Yikes!  Goodbye man of mystery!  But once it settles down into the heart of the story, it feels significantly closer to the spirit of the times & (to a lesser extent) the book then other tries.  Much of this stems from Ladd’s reticence and seeming innocence in what he thinks passes as a cultured environment.  There’s a shocking scene with him, reclining by his pool, looking as petite as he actually was in life, that gets closer to the novel’s ideas on East Coast social envy and caste striving than you’ll find in any of the other films . . . including this one!  When it comes to THE GREAT GATSBY, ‘Not bad adaptation,’ isn’t pejorative.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Not for nothing did this film’s producer, Richard Maibaum, go on to co-write all those early James Bond films.  Grafting Sean Connery’s chip-on-the-shoulder/working class ethos inside an upper-crust world of undercover intelligence operations = GATSBY 007.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Alas, a never-to-be double-bill as that silent GATSBY, directed by Herbert Brenon after his superb BEAU GESTE/’26 (Ronald Colman’s favorite role; w/ Neil Hamilton, Noah Beery & William Powell) remains on the long wish-list of film requests at the Pacific Ocean Archive of junked Hollywood films.