The Great Gatsby (1949)

By 1949 F. Scott Fitzgerald had pretty much been completely forgotten, an unwanted relic of the frivolous Roaring '20s. As it happened, Paramount was desperately searching for a vehicle to suit their top star Alan Ladd, and discovered they owned the rights to something called The Great Gatsby, having filmed the novel before as a silent. Since the book dealt with bootlegging and gangsters (kinda), the studio figgered it could provide a role for Ladd as well as exploit the increasing postwar nostalgia for the carefree and innocent Twenties (every generation thinks the previous one was carefree and innocent).

So this film version of TGG has been filtered through Hollywood's standard noir gangster structure, in the same way the '49 version of All The King's Men was. As a result it's not completely faithful to the book -- at one point Gatsby is shown shooting a guy from a moving car! But it's much better as a movie than the Redford version, and I shudder to even think what Baz has done to Scott, the poor dumb son of a bitch.

IMO it's Ladd's best performance (and that includes Shane). The noir look (photography, art direction) is very good. And best of all, there's no rap.

The eyes have it

Confrontation at the Plaza hotel

Publicity photo intended to make people think TGG was a gangster movie (also note Ladd wearing fedora and trenchcoat in the poster)

A really, really weird publicity photo

Special extra added bonus addition:

The Trailer for the silent 1926 version

Unfortunately the film itself is lost. The trailer is the only surviving footage.

Interesting to see how the material was filmed in the era it was written.

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Posted by chinese58

NELA. after 30 years in Dallas.

Member since Jun 2004

30504 posts

Posted on 5/10/13 at 7:20 pm to Kafka

I'm your Huckleberry.

quote:
intended to make people think TGG was a gangster movie

Yea, that poster looks nothing like you'd expect from Gatsby.

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Posted by Kafka

I am the moral conscience of TD

Member since Jul 2007

142434 posts

Posted on 5/16/13 at 6:11 pm to Kafka

LINK

quote:
The great Italian poster artist Anselmo Ballester, who worked for more than half a century, has more breathtaking designs than I can encompass in one single post

quote:
When I asked Dave Kehr, author of the Museum of Modern Art’s invaluable 2003 book Italian Film Posters and an avid collector himself, about Ballester I knew I was onto a good thing when he called him “for my money, the greatest movie poster artist of all time.”

quote:
Under contract to Columbia, the studio for whom Rita Hayworth was the biggest star in the 1940s, Ballester got to design many of Hayworth’s posters. As Kehr writes, “Ballester’s Hayworth is an icon of joy and sensuality—head thrown back, red hair streaming, captured in a swirl of motion.” That is particularly true of the poster for Affair in Trinidad (1952), in which a vibrant, devil-may-care Hayworth, bursting out of the poster’s frame, laughs in the face of Glenn Ford’s monochrome brutality.