1949/USA
Director: Elliott Nugent
Cinematographer: John Seitz
Screenplay by Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum from the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Lead actors: Alan Ladd, Betty Field, Macdonald Carey
Supporting actors: Ruth Hussey, Barry Sullivan, Howard Da Silva, Shelley Winters, Henry Hull, Carole Mathews
John T. Irwin, in his literary etiology of film noir (Unless The Threat of Death Is Behind Them, Johns Hopkins, 2006), identifies F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as the literary fulcrum for the invention of hard-boiled fiction.
Well before the rise of the gangster film, Fitzgerald linked romance and amour fou with the underworld and set in motion forces that would ultimately coalesce into the world of film noir as it is now known to us.
The literary debt of the five “founding” hard-boiled writers (Burnett, Cain, Chandler, Hammett and Woolrich) to Fitzgerald is also clearly delineated by Irwin. But does this mean that The Great Gatsby is, in and of itself, “noir” by any possible sense of the term? And what about the film version made in 1949, at the apex of noir’s presence in Hollywood? How does it fit into that stylistic formulation and historical jjgsaw puzzle?
Regarding Fitzgerald’s novel, it seems clear that the term “noir precursor” is the most appropriate characterization. The story becomes more lurid as it plays out, approaching hard-boiled fiction if only for its plot elements (the zombie-like revenge of Wilson, the grief-stricken cuckold) if not for its linguistic gear-shifting as the confrontation between Gatsby and Tom Buchanan comes out into the open.
As for the film, it’s clear that a series of tantalizing opportunities to tilt it firmly into the realm of noir existed during its long production prehistory. While most of these opportunities were not fully incorporated into the finished product, enough of the residual elements were captured so that the film can be viewed in the penumbra of noir.
Paramount came close to assigning Raymond Chandler himself to the screenwriting chores. Chandler’s agent, H. N. Swanson, who represented many notable writers (including Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and James M. Cain), had attempted to steer Chandler into such an arrangement prior to his team-up with Billy Wilder on Double Indemnity. Once that project achieved its runaway success, Chandler’s services were focused more exclusively on “pulp” source materials.
James M. Cain was assigned to a scriptwriting cycle on Gatsby right after WW II ended. Unlike Chandler, who intensely admired the book, Cain had little affinity for the material and his efforts to rewrite the ending caused him to be summarily dismissed from the project.
The adaptation finally wound up in the hands of Cyril Hume, an old crony of Fitzgerald’s, and a bright young writer-producer, Richard Maibuam, who was working his way up the ranks at Paramount, having demonstrated some rapport with Alan Ladd in developing the successful espionage film O.S.S. for the studio’s most bankable male star. (Maibaum’s claim to prominence would be cemented a few decades later, when he became a prime mover in the immensely successful series of James Bond films.)
In the midst of shaping the Gatsby script, Maibaum served as producer for John Farrow’s The Big Clock, but the two men did not get along, quashing any hope that the talented but arrogant Farrow would assume the director’s chair for Gatsby. Instead, the film was assigned to Broadway veteran Elliott Nugent, a contract director with little affinity for either literary material or films with a dark visual style. (The closest Nugent had come to noir was the Bob Hope parody My Favorite Brunette.)
The resulting film is carried into the borderlands of noir by the writing team and by the presence of Alan Ladd himself. Ladd had been fascinated by the prospect of playing Gatsby for some time, and exerted unremitting pressure upon Paramount to make the film. In it, he proves that his judgment concerning his affinity for the role is justified.
Hume and Maibaum instinctively pushed the screenplay structure toward what we now recognize as classic noir strategies: the story is told in multiple flashbacks, and Fitzgerald’s evocative but leisurely digressions into the emptiness of social climbing are neatly excised in favor of a more direct portrayal of Gatsby’s reckless pursuit of Daisy.
As with the novel, the script becomes darker and more lurid as the climax nears. Barry Sullivan is particularly adept at capturing the layers within Tom Buchanan’s consummate lack of character, and his actions become pivotal to the fatal finale.
But it is Ladd who does virtually all of the emotional heavy lifting—no mean feat when one recalls his well-documented (and often caricatured) “steely reserve.” Here, however, we can see Ladd has refined and deepened his skill at acting with his eyes. In his scenes of self-revelation with Nick Carraway (Macdonald Carey) and in his scenes with Daisy (Betty Field), we see how comprehensively Ladd has succeeded in capturing Gatsby’s obsessive love—and the relentless drive that has propelled him to such grandiose acts of impersonation.
Ladd’s performance is itself sufficient to carry The Great Gatsby over the threshold into the noir universe, despite the indifferent staging that Nugent often provides for the unfolding action. It’s as if a “noir paint-by-numbers” kit had been handed to the creative team and the most obviously characteristic attributes of noir were then applied to the production effort. Cinematographer John Seitz is a bit more circumspect than is usually the case, slowly building the use of light/shadow effects over the course of the film, highlighting these only in key flashback sequences and in the closing scenes at Gatsby’s pool, where Wilson’s misplaced revenge takes place.
Those key flashbacks, featuring character actor Henry Hull as Dan Cody, Gatsby’s first mentor, represent Hume and Maibaum’s most significant departure from the novel. Cody’s character is significantly expanded, and he takes on distinctly Mephistophelian elements. Hull, often hammy elsewhere, is startlingly effective in this role, with its taunting, sadistic edginess, as a bully who delights in torturing Gatsby over his attraction to Cody’s desirable young wife (played with great skill by the criminally underutilized Carole Mathews). It is an obsession-defining sequence that gives us an intriguing fix on Gatsby’s inner self, and Ladd captures the nuances within this strange personality trait, making it clear how the character could graduate to a more encompassing, all-consuming love quest.
Noir fixtures such as Elisha Cook Jr, Ed Begley, Howard Da Silva (as Wilson), Shelley Winters (Wilson’s wife, who is having an affair with Tom Buchanan), and the unsinkable Tito Vuolo wend their way through the proceedings, adding ambience to the oddly uniform “noir veneer” that hovers in the air with a strangely indefinite insistence.
The theme of amour fou that Fitzgerald parallels so deftly in the novel (one cannot seek redemption through love, one can only be redeemed by setting limits on love) is focused solely on Gatsby in the film. (Nick’s affair with Jordan Baker is the low-key contrasting action in the book.) Nevertheless, its application is strong enough to remind us of how central such a theme is to the romantic underpinnings of noir: Gatsby’s grandiose acts of reinvention are parallel to the “escape from the self” that obsesses and ultimately entraps so many noir heroes—many of whom are, without knowing it, following in his footsteps.
The 1949 version of The Great Gatsby remains in limbo along with much of the Paramount-Universal catalogue; eclipsed unfairly by the empty gloss of the 1974 version featuring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, it is exceptionally obscure--especially given the esteem in which the novel is held. While nowhere near a masterpiece, it is nonetheless a fascinating artifact, and has much to tell us about the forces at work in the noir era--forces that, like Gatsby himself, were driven to a grandiosity that remains tantalizingly larger-than-life.
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