Thank you El Santo for running this thread for so long. Since no one’s officially taken up the mantle I thought I’d take a chance to post about my current obsession, The Great Gatsby. When the Fitzgerald’s copyright expired in 2021 two musical adaptations went into production. In preparation for them I’ve watched four film adaptations. None of them is particularly successful but each tries to flesh out a particular character.

The 1949 film is a strange hybrid. Half Fitzgerald, half generic gangster pic. The screenplay fabricates lengthy flashbacks to Gatsby’s crooked past. Alan Ladd gives a strong performance, though the film only wakes up when it returns to the source material. Jack Clayton’s 1974 adaptation is slow and ponderous. But it introduces iconography that would stick with the characters moving forward. Mia Farrow brings layers of neuroses to the seemingly shallow Daisy Buchanan. She gives the most divisive performance in the film and, in my opinion, the most fascinating. The 2000 television adaptation is a low budget bore. But Paul Rudd brings a cynical petulance to narrator Nick Caraway, allowing a hint of the novel’s queer subtext to peek through. Baz Luhrmann’s splashy 2013 film left a large cultural footprint. He focuses on the shiny surfaces, ignoring the darkness the characters are hiding. He includes a framing device for Tobey Maguire’s Nick Carraway. He’s gone from wide eyed yokel to bitter alcoholic recovering in a sanitarium. His therapist tells him to write a book about his troubles. And that little boy in the book turns out to be…

The musical adaptations expand the roles for the women. The one on Broadway gives Jordan Baker more to do. The one currently in Boston elevates Myrtle Wilson into a co-lead. Boston’s Gatsby is focused on class struggle. It emphasizes the parallels between Daisy’s gilded cage and Myrtle’s working class desperation. It doesn’t always work but it’s a novel take.

Today’s bonus prompt: What story have you watched multiple adaptations of? What’s a story they never “get right?”