After reading Fitzgerald's novel, which I admit has its long passages, I can't say I enjoyed this film adaptation. Fitzgerald wanted to show the life of the super-rich in the 1920s. His characters are distant, the reader is not really supposed to sympathize with them.
Whereas the movie is way more pathetic, I think. It seems like a melodrama from the 50s. The only traces we find from the roaring 20s are a few seconds of Charleston and Joan Fontaine smoking graciously with a cigarette holder.
The novel was way more modern and merciless than the film adaptions a few decades later. Many episodes of suspense were left out, such as Dick being arrested and beaten up in Rome for slapping a policeman, Nicole driving off road on purpose with the whole family in the car, Dick cheating on his wife with Rosemary - and above all the dead man in the hotel, whom nobody cares about.
Instead we see loads of love declarations that were not in the novel and which easily could have been left out.
Too bad Billy Wilder didn't direct the picture. He might have captured the mood of the novel much better, shown all the bitterness and indifference of the characters and therefor done better justice to Fitzgerald.
Review of Tender Is the Night
Tender Is the Night
(1962)
a great socialcritical novel turned into a 60's melodrama
18 February 2021