Apparently there is some kind of unwritten rule that Jay Gatsby has to be played by a blond. So in three different sound versions of The Great Gatsby we've seen him played by Alan Ladd, Robert Redford, and Leonardo DiCaprio. And with that selection of players we get a different Gatsby in all of them.
You can barely catch a hint of Gatsby's plebeian origins in Redford's performance. He seems to the manor born, but his rise to the company of the movers and shakers of the Roaring Twenties puzzles all. He certainly keeps interesting company, he's about to go into business with Meyer Wolfsheim played here by Howard DaSilva who was F. Scott Fitzgerald's caricature of Arnold Rothstein.
Sam Waterston plays Nick Carraway an ambitious young man from the Midwest who happens to have a cousin in Daisy Buchanan married to the wealthy and ruthless Tom Buchanan. Tom's connections are going to see that Carraway will start rising on Wall Street. Daisy and Tom are played by Mia Farrow and Bruce Dern.
Waterston lives in a small cottage on Long Island which today would be astronomical in value given the area. Next door is the mansion of Jay Gatsby where it seems parties never stop. One night Waterston gets an invitation to meet his mysterious neighbor. And he discovers that cousin Daisy and Jay have some history.
Sometimes you can never go back and it's best to leave the past lay and push on ahead. Something that Redford just can't do as he tries to rekindle things with Farrow.
This Gatsby is one elegant film with Oscars for Costume Design and Best Musical Scoring. Given the music of the Roaring Twenties that he had to work with Nelson Riddle came up with great background sounds for the period. The film was also responsible for a bit of a revival of the Irving Berlin classic What'll I Do. The worst thing about the DiCaprio version was that ersatz rock score in that film. I so prefer this.
But I say each Gatsby to your respective taste.
I
You can barely catch a hint of Gatsby's plebeian origins in Redford's performance. He seems to the manor born, but his rise to the company of the movers and shakers of the Roaring Twenties puzzles all. He certainly keeps interesting company, he's about to go into business with Meyer Wolfsheim played here by Howard DaSilva who was F. Scott Fitzgerald's caricature of Arnold Rothstein.
Sam Waterston plays Nick Carraway an ambitious young man from the Midwest who happens to have a cousin in Daisy Buchanan married to the wealthy and ruthless Tom Buchanan. Tom's connections are going to see that Carraway will start rising on Wall Street. Daisy and Tom are played by Mia Farrow and Bruce Dern.
Waterston lives in a small cottage on Long Island which today would be astronomical in value given the area. Next door is the mansion of Jay Gatsby where it seems parties never stop. One night Waterston gets an invitation to meet his mysterious neighbor. And he discovers that cousin Daisy and Jay have some history.
Sometimes you can never go back and it's best to leave the past lay and push on ahead. Something that Redford just can't do as he tries to rekindle things with Farrow.
This Gatsby is one elegant film with Oscars for Costume Design and Best Musical Scoring. Given the music of the Roaring Twenties that he had to work with Nelson Riddle came up with great background sounds for the period. The film was also responsible for a bit of a revival of the Irving Berlin classic What'll I Do. The worst thing about the DiCaprio version was that ersatz rock score in that film. I so prefer this.
But I say each Gatsby to your respective taste.
I