I still believe it to be one of the great adaptations… I called him Coppola and told him what a wonderful thing he had done. If you see the movie, you will find all this hard to believe… The director who was hired, Jack Clayton, is a Brit… he had one thing all of them have in their blood: a murderous sense of class… Well, Clayton decided this: that Gatsby’s parties were shabby and tacky, given by a man of no elevation and taste. There went the ball game. As shot, they were foul and stupid and the people who attended them were foul and silly, and Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, who would have been so perfect as Gatsby and Daisy, were left hung out to dry. Because Gatsby was a tasteless fool and why should we care about their love? It was not as if Coppola’s glory had been jettisoned entirely, though it was tampered with plenty; it was more that the reality and passions it depicted were gone.
Filming
The Rosecliff and Marble House mansions in Newport, Rhode Island and an exterior of Linden Place mansion in Bristol, Rhode Island, were used for Gatsby’s house while scenes at the Buchanans’ home were filmed at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, England. One driving scene was shot in Windsor Great Park, UK. Other scenes were filmed in New York City and Uxbridge, Massachusetts.
Veteran crooner Nick Lucas was chosen by the film’s musical director Nelson Riddle to newly record his arrangements of the songs, “I’m Gonna Charleston Back to Charleston”, “When You and I Were Seventeen” and “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue” for the award-winning soundtrack.
Reception and legacy
The film received mixed reviews, being praised for its faithful interpretation of the novel but also criticized for lacking any true emotion or feelings towards the Jazz Age. Based on 41 total reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an overall approval rating of 41%, with an average rating of 5.1/10. The critical consensus reads: “The Great Gatsby proves that even a pair of tremendously talented leads aren’t always enough to guarantee a successful adaptation of classic literary source material.” Despite this, the film was a financial success, making $26,533,200 against a $7 million budget.
Vincent Canby’s 1974 review in The New York Times typifies the critical ambivalence: “The sets and costumes and most of the performances are exceptionally good, but the movie itself is as lifeless as a body that’s been too long at the bottom of a swimming pool,” Canby wrote at the time. “As Fitzgerald wrote it, The Great Gatsby is a good deal more than an ill-fated love story about the cruelties of the idle rich…The movie can’t see this through all its giant closeups of pretty knees and dancing feet. It’s frivolous without being much fun.”
Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic wrote: “In sum this picture is a total failure of every requisite sensibility. A long, slow, sickening bore.”
Variety’s review was likewise split: “Paramount’s third pass at The Great Gatsby is by far the most concerted attempt to probe the peculiar ethos of the Beautiful People of the 1920s. The fascinating physical beauty of the $6 million-plus film complements the utter shallowness of most principal characters from the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. Robert Redford is excellent in the title role, the mysterious gentleman of humble origins and bootlegging connections…The Francis Ford Coppola script and Jack Clayton’s direction paint a savagely genteel portrait of an upper class generation that deserved in spades what it received circa 1929 and after.”
Roger Ebert gave the movie two and a half stars out of four. Comparing film to the book details, Ebert stated: “The sound track contains narration by Nick that is based pretty closely on his narration in the novel. But we don’t feel. We’ve been distanced by the movie’s overproduction. Even the actors seem somewhat cowed by the occasion; an exception is Bruce Dern, who just goes ahead and gives us a convincing Tom Buchanan.”
Tennessee Williams, in his book Memoirs, wrote: “It seems to me that quite a few of my stories, as well as my one acts, would provide interesting and profitable material for the contemporary cinema, if committed to… such cinematic masters of direction as Jack Clayton, who made of The Great Gatsby a film that even surpassed, I think, the novel by Scott Fitzgerald.”
Fitzgerald’s daughter, Frances “Scottie” Fitzgerald, who sold the film rights, had reread her father’s novel and noted how Mia Farrow on-set looked the part as her father’s Daisy, while Robert Redford also asked advice to match the author’s intent, but her father, she noted, was more in the narrator, Nick. However, after viewing the film, Fitzgerald’s daughter criticized Farrow’s performance as Daisy. Although she praised Farrow as a “fine actress,” Scottie noted that Farrow seemed unable to convey the “intensely Southern nature” of Daisy’s character.
In the 2004 documentary film Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession, a montage of scenes of films shown on the defunct Z Channel is played with William Atherton’s cover of Irving Berlin’s “What’ll I Do?” from the 1974 adaptation.
Awards and honors
The film won two Academy Awards, for Best Costume Design (Theoni V. Aldredge) and Best Music (Nelson Riddle).
It also won three BAFTA Awards for Best Art Direction (John Box), Best Cinematography (Douglas Slocombe), and Best Costume Design (Theoni V. Aldredge).
The male costumes were executed by Ralph Lauren, and the female costumes by Barbara Matera. It won a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress (Karen Black) and received three further nominations for Best Supporting Actor (Bruce Dern and Sam Waterston) and Most Promising Newcomer (Sam Waterston).
