"The Great Gatsby" 1974 review*

About the film in general I may say it didn’t produce very much effect on me. I liked it because I like movies and cinema on the whole (now is even a period when I’m greatly interested in cinematography). And if the film didn’t impress me profoundly I can’t convey my perception of it right after the view, I need some time to reflect, to think it over. I remember I’d started to watch the movie with excitement and expectation of something amazing so to speak. May be, partly because of overshadowing and anticipatory pressure of Robert Redford’s fame as one of the greatest and “long-playing” Hollywood stars, partly because of that was a new thing to watch a motion picture at a class and it already promised good time. But, actually, this film seemed too protracted to me and I wasn’t completely satisfied with the casts.
As for Mia Farrow, I liked the way she embodied Daisy on the screen. May be, I wasn’t very attentive, but after reading the book I found that there always failed something to her image when I was trying to reproduce her portrait in my mind, I couldn’t make up the clear character. And Mia Farrow’s acting added missing details to it: I really recognized that her jingling voice is full of money, that she’s kind of careless and light-minded person, and her frailty, airiness, sugariness correspond well with it all. “High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl”…
I liked Scott Wilson’s acting. He managed to play a complicated role because in my opinion it’s more difficult to play remarkably an apathetic, listless, inconspicuous character, what Wilson is, than a brilliant, agreeable, positive one.
Now it’s time to subject somebody to criticism)) For part of Robert Redford I was disappointed. It’s not exactly because of his acting technique or his plausibility, may be it refers more to a casting director, because Redford is not Gatsby as I see him. I agree with Kate in the subject of absence of Gatsby’s branded smile, which he practiced and which liked everybody, I didn’t notice that “elaborate formality of speech” and the impression that “he was picking his words with care”. For me Redford’s Gatsby looks like that prince on a white steed from the fairy tale: he’s very handsome (the same situation as with Cary Grant which we discussed earlier in one of the posts here), elegant, his blonde hair and blue eyes make women melt, he doesn’t seem thrifty (in terms of thinking only about money, partly because of Daisy’s status and her craving for wealth, but still), insidious (he followed the path from steward and skipper to limousines, yachts and celebrities not on the very fair way, at least he dealt with drugs!), practical or pretence, as Gatsby from the book seemed to me. Redford looks like very handsome, all positive hero without human foibles.
Concerning Tom Buchanan, I didn’t like that actors’ incarnation, because he didn’t look like a “sturdy straw-haired man with hard mouth and supercilious manner” with “arrogant eyes”. In the book it’s said that “you could see a great pack of muscle” and that Toms’ body was “capable of enormous leverage – a cruel body”, I didn’t feel it in the actor.
About Nick Carraway… Hmm, at first sight I was surprised with his unpleasantness, but during the film, I forgot about it and in the end he seemed quite a good cast to me.
About the film in the whole, some details were omitted and some situations (like Jordan’s story about Daisy’s and Tom’s wedding) were changed and I think, in most cases, it helped to show better the characters or the atmosphere. For example, think it was a good move to show a dead seagull before the scene of Jay’s and Daisy’s meeting (it was a symbol of hopelessness of their relationships and that it all will come to a bad end). Or, another example, at the end light-headed Daisy appears with Tom and doesn’t suffer or even think about her former love, now dead. The director showed better her personality through this alteration of the original plot.