NOT-SO-GREAT GATSBY

Attention old-movie freaks within an easy drive of southern California: Next weekend, May 10 through 13, marks the 12th annual edition of my favorite film festival in the country: The Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival, at the Camelot Theatres on Baristo in Palm Springs.

As usual this year’s schedule includes a variety of hard-to-catch crime films of the mid-20th century, such as 1948’s I Love Trouble with Franchot Tone, 1954’s Shield for Murder with Edmond O’Brien and 1960’s Key Witness with Dennis Hopper. Also on the bill this year are such more familiar selections as The Big Heat and the rip-roaring 1947 Joan Crawford fave Possessed. Scheduled as special guests this year are vets like Richard Erdman, William Schallert, Patricia Crowley and Kathleen Hughes, as well as Alan Ladd’s son David and Glenn Ford’s son Peter.

But maybe the most interesting curio on the schedule this year is Paramount’s obscure 1949 version of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, with Alan Ladd in the title role.

I had long wanted to see this film, and not long ago I was shown a bootleg copy (appropriately enough) and learned that while it’s a rarely-shown movie, it’s no lost classic. Despite a fantastic cast—Macdonald Carey as Nick, Betty Field as Daisy, Barry Sullivan as Tom, Ruth Hussey as Jordan, Shelley Winters as Myrtle, and Henry Hull, Elisha Cook, Jr., Howard Da Silva and Ed Begley among the supporting players—this version is laughably pedestrian.

Based in part on a stage adaptation by Owen Davis, this Gatsby suffers from banal dialogue and a perplexing absence of the novel’s intrigue and mystery. We’re shown Gatsby’s occupation in the opening minutes—there’s even a shoot-out, in which Ladd’s Gatsby participates with hilarious half-heartedness and distaste—and the motivation behind the crazy opulence of his lifestyle is revealed early, too. Good as the cast is, some of them are not well-served by the material: Betty Field, so touching in Of Mice and Men, is particularly excruciating here.

Terrible as the movie is, though, it’s worth seeing if you get the chance. Even in this crude and clumsy retelling, the story, with its adolescent fantasy of romantic gesture blended with its blunt awareness that money trumps romance, has its appeal, and the stripping-away of Fitzgerald’s graceful language throws a striking light on the illusory nature of genre divisions in general.

At first Gatsby struck me as a stretch for inclusion in a noir festival. But then I tried to consider the story aside from its reputation as a highbrow literary classic—infidelity and obsessive love, gangsters and bootleggers, a hit-and-run, a cover-up, a man manipulated into murder, and above all a guy brought low because he’s a sucker for a dame. How much more "noir-y" did I want it to be?

That Gatsby isn’t seen in terms of the genre is, of course, partly because of Fitzgerald’s elegant style, the opposite of the hard-boiled argot that is associated (incorrectly, for the most part) with noir writing. But it’s also because of hard-wired literary predjudice—Gatsby is seen (rightly) as top-notch American literature, while novels critically defined as “noir” are frequently seen, by definition, as not quite literature at all. This attitude may be changing, but it hasn’t changed yet.