Order The Great Gatsby (1974)

The Great Gatsby is a colorful, funny, panoramic book full of penetrating individual character studies and strong opinions about the lives of the wealthy. This movie version doesn't communicate any of the book's depth. The director focuses the movie on Gatsby's and Daisy's brief romance. It is the main focus of the movie. But in the book, their 'romance' is a minor point. It doesn't occupy many pages at all. In fact, one interpretation of the book is that Daisy doesn't truly love Gatsby. Rather, he's just another plaything for this bored rich woman, one that allows her to get even with her brutal husband's affair that he flaunts in front of her before Gatsby shows up.
The actors in the movie don't fit the characterization of the book. Bruce Dern portrays Tom Buchanan as weak. Fitzgerald shows Buchanan as a physically imposing, 6'3", 220ib college football star, who turns every encounter into a contest, a contest he intends to win. Dern doesn't show Buchanan's sheer intimidation. Robert Redford is OK as Gatsby, but it's not a hard role, because there isn't much depth to Gatsby. The interesting characters in the book are Tom & Daisy Buchanan and Jordan. Mia Farrow portrays Daisy as weak, unstable and easily upset. Fitzgerald shows Daisy as uninterested, confident and manipulative of situations.
This movie is a bust, but it's also 35yrs old. I hope a talented director and screenwriter see the opportunity for a new film interpretation about this magnificent book.
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For film buffs, this movie is interesting in that it's a big money movie. Gatsby is released around the same time as Scorsese's & DeNiro's masterpieces of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Those two geniuses to take Jake LaMotta's autobiography, and turn it into a cinematic masterpiece, one that is the forerunner of how films were made for the next couple decades. At the same time, Jack Clayton takes a masterpiece of a novel about dreams and wealth and ambition, the Great Gatsby, and removes all the interesting aspects of the book, and hands us only a tepid love story. It's movies like Gatsby that show what a genius Scorsese is, because he takes everyday material and spins gold.Get more detail about The Great Gatsby (1974).