Flashback, December 1990: ‘The Godfather Part III’ Ends Saga in a Dying Fall

The Godfather Part III arrived in American theaters over the 1990 holiday season burdened with reports of a troubled production that eventually outweighed the hopes for a repeat of its two Oscar-winning predecessors. 

Though not a disaster, it didn’t live up to box-office expectations either, grossing approximately $136.9 million worldwide against a $54 million budget—hardly the record-shattering blockbuster that the original was.

Much of the pre-release bad press concentrated on the decision by director Francis Ford Coppola to cast daughter Sofia in the pivotal role of Michael Corleone’s daughter Mary. This derision had an element of Schadenfreude, in the way that many critics have of taking an award-winning filmmaker down a peg after a string of successes.

More in a minute on alternatives to Sofia Coppola. But there was another casting choice—a refusal to bring back a key cast member from the earlier films—that had just as critical an impact on the project.

Viewers expecting to see Robert Duvall as consiglieri Tom Hagen were in for a big letdown. The actor, nominated for Best Supporting Actor in the role in The Godfather Part I, wanted more than the $1 million he was offered for this second sequel, believing it wasn’t close to what Al Pacino ($5 million) and Diane Keaton ($1.5 million) would be receiving.

Coppola, facing financing and scheduling restrictions by studio Paramount Pictures, couldn’t accommodate the demand. But he incurred stiff creative consequences for rewriting Hagen out of the script.

It wasn’t just that Hagen’s straight-arrow son, Fr. Andrew Hagen (played by John Savage), was only a shadow of his dad, given how little he figured in the final cut. It wasn’t even that the bland WASP lawyer character invented to replace Hagen, B.J. Harrison (played by George Hamilton), was likewise a pale reminder of Hagen.

No, it meant that Michael couldn’t turn to Hagen as his natural choice to run the foundation meant to launder the Corleone family’s blood-stained reputation, but instead would select Mary. 

Moreover, the new movie would abruptly short-circuit a running thread of the first two films without explanation: Hagen’s struggle to balance his intense loyalty as an adopted member of the Corleones with his conscience.

Though Duvall was sorely missed, it was by casting his daughter that Coppola turned himself into the pinata for critics. In his defense, it was a decision made under tremendous duress.

Julia Roberts was originally cast as Mary Corleone, but had to withdraw because of scheduling conflicts in finishing the film that would lift her to superstardom, Pretty Woman.

Her replacement, Winona Ryder, was a seasoned actress who could have brought heat to the love scenes with illegitimate cousin Vincent Mancini (Andy Garcia, in an explosive Oscar-nominated performance), and personified an independence strongly suggestive of her mother, the family outsider Kay Adams-Corleone.

But what was described in press reports as “nervous exhaustion” (i.e., working nonstop on several films back to back) led to a prolonged medical absence for the actress.

Coppola could have waited for Ryder to recover, or he could have gone with two other rising young actresses, Laura San Giacomo (recently in Sex, Lies, and Videotape) or Annabella Sciorra (Jungle Fever). But the director had decided that Mary Corleone should be a teenager, and in looking around for a member of that age group who saw someone close at hand: Sofia.

Sofia Coppola was 19 years old at the time of production, with neither experience nor interest to date in becoming an actress. Her mother Eleanor, a documentary filmmaker who had observed and chronicled the excesses of her husband, feared that this was another one of his mistakes.

With a production deadline bearing down on him and a belief that she was closer to his conception of Mary Corleone, Francis chose to go with her, perhaps believing he could elicit a fine performance from the neophyte. The decision was reminiscent of John Huston’s in casting his similarly inexperienced teen daughter, Anjelica Huston, in the 1969 movie A Walk With Love and Death.

But Francis Ford Coppola was dealing not with a one-off art house historical drama as Huston was but a high-stakes movie franchise. Sofia became collateral damage.

The vacuums caused by the absence of Duvall and Ryder led to frenzied rewrites, a process that had begun a decade before Coppola and novelist-screenwriter Mario Puzo formally committed to the project. By the time it was over, 16 script variations had been produced.

All this rewriting resulted in problems with plot and characterization. The real-life scandal that became intertwined with Michael Corleone’s effort at redemption—the Vatican Bank—wasn’t introduced until 40 minutes into the film. And why did Connie Corleone (played by Talia Shire) evolve from the wayward and outraged sister of Michael in Parts I and II to one not only wholly supportive but exceeding him in calculation and cunning in Part III?

Given all of these issues, as well as Coppola’s acceptance of the project as a means of extricating himself from his financial reverses of the prior decade, the wonder is not merely that The Godfather Part III was made at all but that it turned out as well as it did, with seven Oscar nominations including Best Picture. (Inexplicably, Pacino wasn’t nominated for Best Actor.)

Pacino, Keaton and Garcia turned in superb performances, the cinematography was excellent, and, for all its imperfections, the Puzo-Coppola screenplay contained its share of excellent lines (e.g., Michael’s oft-quoted, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”).Coppola’s 2020 re-edit prompted a more positive reappraisal of this conclusion to this indispensable crime family epic.

This Day in Film History (‘Godfather Part II,’ Oscar-Winning Sequel, Opens)

Dec. 20, 1974—Two years after The Godfather broke box-office records, the sequel went into general release in the U.S., in a production that was more generously budgeted, longer, more ambitious—and with a far more tragic vision of the American Dream.

The Godfather Part II duplicated its predecessor’s success, garnering six Academy Awards, including Best Picture.  Many critics regard it as even superior to the first. 

Though it mirrored the original in many respects, it departed from it in relying less on memorable killings (e.g., the toll-booth murder of Sonny) and one-liners (“leave the gun, take the cannoli”) and more on narrative structure, characterization, and symbolism.

While Francis Ford Coppola was initially reluctant to direct Part II (even suggesting Martin Scorsese for the job), he came around to the idea because of two factors.

First, he insisted on—and won—greater creative control, largely sidelining his nemesis on the first film, Paramount studio exec Robert Evans, in the process.

Second, he was so disturbed by the audience’s delight at a sneak preview for the first film—the final scene, where the door is closed on Kay Corleone as her husband Michael conducts “business” as the new don—that he wanted to leave no doubt whatsoever that a fissure had appeared in their marriage and that the crime boss had endangered his soul.

In other words, he wanted to definitively disprove critics who thought the first film had romanticized the Mafia by depicting them as devoted family men rather than as killers. By the end of Part II, Michael Corleone sits utterly alone, as his focus on “business” has left him paranoid and questioning how it could have all gone so utterly wrong.

What went wrong for the Corleones, the film suggests, is also what went wrong with the American empire.

The movie, while covering roughly the years from 1957 to 1960, actually reflects America’s dark post-Vietnam, post-Watergate mood, in which cynicism about government lies and corruption became the order of the day. 

Coppola settled on the architecture of this epic with parallel stories of two fathers of roughly the same age, Vito and Michael Corleone, tracing the rise and decline of their family—their personal one as well as the criminal one they head.

I discussed Part II briefly 10 years ago in this post. I had seen bits and pieces over the years, both in The Godfather Saga (a chronological TV presentation beginning with nine-year-old Vito Corleone in Italy through the death of his son Michael roughly three-quarters of a century later) and on AMC (where, over the last few years, Parts I, II and III have been run as holiday mini-marathons).

But a couple of days ago, for the first time, I saw Part II as a complete entity in its own right, reel to reel. The richness I (re)discovered convinced me it was worthwhile exploring in greater depth.

Its nearly half-hour more of running time compared with Godfather I gave co-screenwriters Coppola and novelist Mario Puzo more time not only to convey atmosphere, but also to offer hints about character motivations and relationships.

This time, knowing the major plot points of the movie, small, seemingly minor moments loom larger, as with the pills that Michael takes on the way to meet partner Hyman Roth—perhaps a means of alleviating the tension and anxiety of running a far-flung criminal enterprise and of surviving an assassination in his own home.

Coppola has likened the film to a saga about a king and his three sons. The imperial theme resonates most loudly and mournfully when Corleone consiglieri Tom Hagen and “soldier” Frankie Pentangeli muse on the Roman Empire:

Hagen: “You were around the old timers who dreamed up how the Families should be organized, how they based it on the old Roman Legions, and called them 'Regimes'... with the 'Capos' and 'Soldiers,' and it worked.”

Pentangeli: “Yeah, it worked. Those were great old days. We was like the Roman Empire. The Corleone family was like the Roman Empire.”

Hagen (sadly): “Yeah, it was once.”

While thoroughly of its own time, Part II anticipated much of the disillusionment in America over the last few decades by detailing the costs of the intersection of entertainment, politics, business, and crime.

Perhaps the most vivid example is when Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista meets with United Fruit Company, United Telephone and Telegraph Company, Pan American Mining Corp., South American Sugar—and Michael Corleone and Hyman Roth.

Visually, it echoes the scene from Part I when a grief-stricken Vito Corleone calls a summit meeting of the Mafia families to call a halt to their bloody vendetta—as the inclusion of Corleone and Roth with the more conventional companies implies that little difference exists between ostensibly non-criminal and criminal enterprises.

That sense is reinforced when Batista thanks a group member for the Christmas “gift” of a solid gold telephone, and later when Roth confides to colleagues: 

“There’s no limit to where we can go from here. This kind of government knows how to help business, to encourage it…We can thank our Friends in the Cuban government, which has put up half of the cash with the Teamsters on a dollar-for-dollar basis and has relaxed restrictions on imports. What I'm saying is that we have now what we have always needed: real partnership with the government.”

Roth is voicing the code of businessmen that has prevailed so often from Adolf Hitler to the wanna-be dictators of today: the transgressions of government heads matter little so long as they can forge a “real partnership” that allows them carte blanche to operate.

It has been a devolutionary process even near the start of the movie, when nine-year-old Vito and other passengers gaze longingly at the Statue of Liberty, coming just a few scenes after we see what has happened over 50 years later: Vito’s now-grown son Michael tangling with a zenophobic U.S. senator over a bribe to secure a Las Vegas casino gambling license.

Quote of the Day (Francis Ford Coppola, on ‘This Thing Called My Life’)

“I'm starting to think that this thing called my life is a movie I'm making. I'm going to write the ending of it shortly, but I don’t know what it’s going to be.”—Oscar-winning American filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, “The Gambler,” WSJ. , October 2024

Another force—God—will be the one to decide the final scene to the movie of his life, but the Almighty is likely to be more merciful and less fickle than Hollywood producers or even American filmgoers to daring, passionate, complicated Francis Ford Coppola. 

No matter the disappointing response to his latest, if not last, film this fall, the sci-fic epic Megalopolis, Coppola is assured a place in film history for, if nothing else, The Godfather Saga. His reception of Kennedy Center honors virtually certifies that.

Two speakers at yesterday’s ceremony helped to explain the enormous risks that alternately raised his career to undreamed-of heights and threatened to bring it asunder.

George Lucas: ““Here’s the thing: When you spend enough time with Francis, you begin to believe that you can jump off cliffs too.”

Al Pacino said the filmmaker was ready to break the first rule of Hollywood: Never put your own money in your movie projects.

Quote of the Day (Francis Ford Coppola, on Art and Time)

“Art controls time, it always has. From the moment someone first painted a picture, they were stopping time.”—Oscar-winning American filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, “The Gambler,” WSJ. , October 2024

Flashback, March 1972: Brilliant Brando Briefly Revived in ‘The Godfather’

The Godfather, released 50 years ago this month in the U.S., did more than just update the gangster film genre of the Great Depression, introduce a host of memorable movie catchphrases, and lift the profiles of rising actors such as Al Pacino, Robert Duvall and James Caan.

No, the top-grossing film of 1972 and winner of the Best Picture Oscar for that year also marked a return to brilliance, however brief, of the most influential actor of the postwar period: Marlon Brando.

The recent death of William Hurt, with a decade of glory in the 1980s, reminded me more than a little of Brando: another performer with a string of Oscar nominations and one statuette in a concentrated period; another character actor whose unexpected success as a leading man made him uncomfortable; and another conflicted personality whose youthful idiosyncrasies and self-indulgence reduced the quality of the projects he was given in middle age.

Hurt’s late-career Best Supporting Actor nomination as a crime boss in A History of Violence called to mind, albeit fleetingly, his great string of performances in The Big Chill, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Children of a Lesser God, and Broadcast News. But it came in a film that he did not anchor and that never became a landmark in cultural history.

In contrast, Brando’s turn as Mafia chieftain Vito Corleone did all of that.

Moreover, the character couldn’t be more different from the roles that made him a legend in the 1950s: brutal, animalistic Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire; rebellious gang leader Johnny Strabler in The Wild One; and the anguished washed-up boxer turned informant Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront.  

As marvelous as he was in those films, his time onscreen in The Godfather represented a master class in cinematic character creation—as well as one of the most remarkable comebacks a leading man has ever made back to relevance.

What Brando himself called 10 “dank, dismal” films made over the prior decade had given him more than a reputation for high maintenance: they had also rendered him box-office poison. 

His defiance of convention (e.g., reading cue cards placed discreetly off camera rather than memorizing lines), once tolerated if not celebrated, was now simply abominated.

Virtually none of the executives at Paramount Pictures wanted Brando as Mafia patriarch Vito Corleone, including the late producer Robert Evans. 

(I almost burst out laughing when, at Sunday night’s Oscars, director Francis Ford Coppola thanked Evans. You would never have known how much they clashed about virtually everything during the movie’s production.)

After butting heads with studio bosses over his lone directing gig, the 1961 western One-Eyed Jacks, and being blamed for the costly bomb Mutiny on the Bounty, Brando had largely lost interest in movies. Some of his projects (e.g., The Ugly American) stemmed from his well-intentioned idealism; others (e.g., Reflections in a Golden Eye), from a belief that directors like John Huston and Arthur Penn could create compelling films. None had really worked out.

In considering an adaptation of Mario Puzo’s bestselling potboiler in 1970, Hollywood execs wanted someone, anyone, else besides Brando to play Vito: Laurence Olivier, Ernest Borgnine, Richard Conte, Anthony Quinn, Carlo Ponti, even comedian-TV producer Danny Thomas. 

Maybe only two people with responsibility for how the character would be created saw Brando as ideal for the part: Puzo and Coppola, then looking to make the leap from highly regarded screenwriter (Patton) to director in his own right.

The very thought of Thomas—who, through his own long-running comedy series (Make Room for Daddy) and others he had produced for others (e.g., The Andy Griffith Show), had enough capital to buy a controlling interest in Paramount and enjoy a clear path to the role—was enough to rouse Puzo to action.

Writing from a fat farm where he had gone to shed weight, Puzo wrote a letter urging Brando to take on the role: “I think you’re the only actor who can play the Godfather with that quiet force and irony (the book is an ironical comment on American society) the part requires.”

At first, Brando dismissed the idea. But a deep look at the script roused him from his torpor by convincing him that it was not strictly about the Mafia so much as “the corporate mind.”

Or, as he elaborated to journalist Shana Alexander for a Life Magazine cover story: “The Mafia is so American! To me, a key phrase in the story is that whenever they wanted to kill somebody it was always a matter of policy. Before pulling the trigger, they told him, ‘Just business, nothing personal.’ When I read that, [Vietnam War architects Robert] McNamara, [Lyndon] Johnson, and [Dean] Rusk flashed before my eyes.”

Although this realization informed his general consciousness of the story’s larger meaning, the genius of his characterization lay in the thousands of details he used to bring it to life, in these ways:

*Physical transformation: The appearance of Vito Corleone evolved during what Coppola told the actor was a “makeup test” but which was, instead, a de factor audition for the benefit of doubting Paramount heads. Coppola had a cameraman on hand to record how Brando, a blonde in his late 40s from the Midwest, turned himself into an Italian two decades older: pulling his hair back, applying shoe polish, and then, to effect the look of what he called a “bulldog,” stuffing his cheeks with Kleenex. (During the actual filming, he used a mouthpiece made by a dentist--and, to solidify this impression of an older man, he would walk around with weights around his stomach and in his shoes.)

*Voice: Two decades after Brando made an indelible impression on American culture with the primal yell “STELLA!!!” in A Streetcar Named Desire, he did the same by lowering his voice to barely above a whisper in The Godfather. He did so because of his conviction that this is how Vito, previously shot in the throat, would sound now. Moreover, he had been struck by the raspy voice of mob boss Frank Costello in the 1951 Kefauver hearings. “Powerful people don’t need to shout,” Brando realized. This mumbling forced those who interacted with The Don—as well as the audience—to lean forward to pay closer attention.

*Improvisation: Sometimes Brando would work with a prop supplied by Coppola, such as a stray cat that the director found on the set (and which the actor then held throughout a scene). Once, it was a spontaneous decision, an outgrowth of the needs of the scene and Brando’s frustration with another actor: a slap across the face of Al Martino, playing the Sinatra-like singer Johnny Fontaine. “Martino didn’t know whether to laugh or cry,” remembered Caan. The most ingenious improvisation, though, occurred during Vito’s death scene, a sequence that studio executives initially scorned as unnecessary. Coppola was struggling with how to believably depict the sickly, elderly mob boss playing with his grandson.  As the director later told Playboy: "[Brando] said, 'Here's how I play with kids,' and took an orange peel, cut it into pieces that looked like fangs and slipped them into his mouth." “Of course!” Coppola continued. “The godfather dies as a monster!" But that wasn’t the only reason the scene suddenly became effective. Stylistically, it formed part of a leitmotif with the earlier scene when oranges roll on the street after Vito is shot. (The bright colors formed an ironic contrast with the doom represented by the action). Furthermore, this death scene, surreptitiously and hastily filmed to avoid the prying eyes of visiting studio personnel, had become so memorable that they couldn’t dream of cutting it.

*Interacting with cast members: In an interview with Parade Magazine to commemorate the movie’s 50^th anniversary, Talia Shire, who played daughter Connie Corleone, praised Brando’s “tremendous elegance”: “Look at the way he dances with me in that wedding scene. But what I found was that he was also incredibly charismatic, generous and disciplined. He really wanted you to be great in a scene.” The rest of the cast, already awestruck just to be in the same movie as this seminal influence on postwar screen acting, bonded with him from the start of the production during dinner at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan.

*Trusting his director: Many of Brando’s problems with the movies of the prior decade had been caused by disillusion and even disgust with individual directors. But from the beginning, he had placed his faith in Coppola, a novice behind the camera, and he had not been disappointed. Coppola’s extensive pre-production rehearsals with actors, for instance, reminded him of a similar method used by Elia Kazan, who had guided him to Oscar-nominated performances in Streetcar, Viva Zapata!, and On the Waterfront, according to William J. Mann’s biography of Brando, The Contender. In the end, Brando’s confidence in Coppola saved the film and arguably altered the course of the director’s career after studio execs, disgruntled with the movie’s early rushes, contemplated replacing Coppola with Kazan. Hearing the news, Brando threatened to quit—a major risk for someone whose troublesome reputation had rendered him persona non grata in the Hollywood. It is impossible to imagine another director, lacking Coppola’s feel for the Italian-American milieu of the story, conjuring up similar cinematic magic.

The dominant actor of his era, Brando also dominated The Godfather; though present in less than 40% of its screen time, he consistently remained the focus of its attention. At least partly in recognition of that fact, he won an Oscar for the role. 

Yet Brando couldn’t help but display his contempt for the industry once again, as he asked actress Sacheen Littlefeather to appear at the ceremony to reject the award on his behalf as a protest against Hollywood’s stereotypical portrayals of Native Americans.

Brando had one more performance that drew on all his emotional resources, as a haunted widower in the sexually explicit Last Tango in Paris. But director Bernardo Bertolucci's demands were too much for his psyche, and he would never invest so much of his energy in roles thereafter.

Even after the shock and tumult created by his films has faded, Brando remains a complicated, even controversial, figure for his off-screen life. (Actress Rita Moreno, who attempted suicide in frustration with his cheating during their eight-year relationship, told fellow Oscar winner Jessica Chastain that he was “a bad guy when it came to women.”)

But the mysterious power of his best work onscreen endures as well. In particular, The Godfather has inspired two generations of actors, and even evoked tributes of another kind: parody. 

Disguising himself as The Godfather in The Revenge of the Pink Panther, Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau accidentally swallows a cotton ball he’s stuffed in his mouth, and Brando himself sent up his character in the 1990 comedy The Freshman.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Godfather: Part II,’ With the Kiss of Death)

Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino): “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart!”— The Godfather: Part II (1974), screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo, based on characters created for Puzo’s novel The Godfather, directed by Francis Ford Coppola

The Godfather: Part II, which premiered 40 years ago today in New York, didn’t have the propulsive drive and shock of its predecessor, but it surpassed it in demands on the audience, ambition, and assessment of the soul-deadening costs of a life of crime. In the process, it became the first sequel to win the Best Picture Oscar.

One of the most common criticisms of the first Godfather film was that it romanticized mobsters as family men. Part II, in many respects, seemed to be a direct answer to that complaint, as Michael—whose progress from idealistic war veteran to head of a crime family was detailed in Part I—now finds himself progressively isolated from all members of his clan.

Michael adheres all too well to the advice of his father: “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” To expand the “family business,” from Las Vegas to pre-revolutionary Havana, he embodies the cold, coiled lethality of a snake.

In fact, perhaps he displays more passion here, in his confrontation with weak, unwary sibling Fredo (played by John Cazale), than throughout the rest of the film. A slip of the tongue by Fredo confirms his younger brother’s suspicion that Fredo not only connived with Hyman Roth, but that he helped the older gangster set up a hit on Michael.

And so, in a scene more shocking and devastating than the violent scenes (16 deaths) throughout, Michael plants a “kiss of death” on Fredo at a New Year’s Eve celebration in Havana. The act functions as an inversion, turning an affirmation into a negation, a vow of good faith into a naked avowal of betrayal, and a year’s beginning into an unmistakable mark of a life’s ending.

It is hard not to see how bleak his entry in The Godfather Saga has become. The first film, opening the year of the Watergate break-in, was cynical about both government and law enforcement, yet continued to hold the banner of family aloft. No such solace is offered this time.

Cold, manipulative, deceptive Michael has so often broken his promise to go legitimate that wife Kay decides to punish him by aborting his son. That is not the only promise he will break to a family member, however: he also reneges on his agreement with his sister Connie that he forgive Fredo. That radical act of love could have broken the endless cycle of violence, perhaps, but it is impossible given the life Michael chose more than a decade ago.

The last extended flashback in the film—Pearl Harbor Day, when a birthday party for Vito Corleone is being planned by Michael and three family members who will die from violence, future brother-in-law Carlo and brothers Sonny and Fredo—is followed with the muted, desolate scene of Michael, sitting alone and lost in the family garden at Lake Tahoe. He may have turned his family-owned business into an enterprise "bigger than U.S. Steel," but at what cost?

Flashback, March 1974: Redford’s Disappointing ‘Gatsby’ Premieres

It’s seldom a good thing when a new film’s budget and clothes receive more media attention than its script, direction or even cast. So it proved with the third film version of The Great Gatsby, which premiered in New York on March 27, 1974 and opened in wider release two days later. Attendees at the premiere came dressed in the 1920s flapper beads and feathers depicted in the movie.

Theoni Aldredge won the Oscar for the film’s costumes (though Ralph Lauren, himself a Gatsby-like character with his reinvention of self, probably deserved at least half of the award, as he designed the clothes for all the men in the film), but that proved to be only one of two Academy Awards (and minor ones at that) gained by the movie. Precious little else associated with the adaptation of the classic novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald attracted the public’s attention. The hype, starting with the $6.4 million budget, was so immense—including covers by Time and Newsweek—that it triggered a critical backlash.

Expectations were high also because of its star, Robert Redford, coming into his own then as Hollywood’s epitome of the elusive leading man, following the huge hit The Way We Were. Total domestic grosses for the film were $20.6 million, more than making the film’s money back, but the exalted nature of the source material, the star, and the hype left an air of disappointment around the movie so heavy that a misimpression spread that it was simply a financial disaster for Paramount Pictures.

Much of that had to do with a critical reception that was, at best, tepid. The New York Times’ Vincent Canby represented the consensus by noting that, while the sets, costumes and even some performances were “exceptionally good,” the movie as a whole “is as lifeless as a body that's been too long at the bottom of a swimming pool.”

It might be time to revisit the film, both in comparison to other versions of the book and on its own terms. The budget notwithstanding, this Gatsby was less a case of wretched excess than a piece of cinema as stately as a luxury ocean liner. This was in marked contrast to the Baz Luhrmann version that opened last year—which, against all odds (especially the very mixed critical reaction), became a hit. (See my take on one serious difference between novel and film—the treatment of “incurably dishonest” golfer Jordan Baker.)

Luhrmann made all kinds of questionable alterations in bringing his vision of the book to the big screen—including an anachronistic score (one problem not applicable to Nelson Riddle's Oscar-winning one for the '74 version) and turning the novel’s first-person narrator, Nick Carraway, into an alcoholic retelling the events. The 1926 silent film version was, in the words of Zelda Fitzgerald, so “ROTTEN and awful and terrible” that she and her husband walked out of the theater. In 1949, the first sound version, starring Alan Ladd and directed by Elliott Nugent, featured a script that left little sense of the novel’s subtlety, largely because of its heavy moralizing, its altered youthful background for Gatsby, and (oddly enough, for a film only 20 years after the decade shown) no flavor for the Prohibition era.

In 1974, concern arose over whether a foreign director sufficiently understood the United States to deal what with many people (including myself) regard as the Great American Novel. But that, by itself, should not have disqualified director Jack Clayton. Going back to Alexis de Tocqueville, some of the most astute commentators on America have been foreigners who came to the nation with fresh eyes. In film, Alfred Hitchcock adapted quickly to the United States as a subject, despite spending the first 40 years of his life in Britain.

In fact, much of Clayton’s prior work would have encouraged hope that he was well-equipped to handle this material. Not only had he directed critically acclaimed adaptations of literary classics (e.g., The Innocents, his 1961 version of Henry James’ Turn of the Screw), but he had also directed another film about a male social climber (Room at the Top).

For all the problems that reviewers found in the finished product, it could have been worse. The first screenplay draft, by Truman Capote (Clayton’s collaborator on The Innocents), was understandably deemed problematic: Clayton, according to Carolyne Bevan’s summary of the director’s archive in the British Film Institute, felt it was “like a great fish that is all head and no tail”—too long, with too little about the past relationship between Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan and too much action in the final minutes. 

Moreover, given Capote’s depiction of Nick as gay and Jordan Baker as lesbian, Clayton and Paramount Pictures would have outraged Fitzgerald’s daughter, Frances “Scottie” Fitzgerald Lanehan Smith, for being untrue to the book and for introducing risqué material that would have undercut a potentially large audience: high-school students assigned the book for class.    

Wayne Gooderham, in a post for The Guardian’s blog, has argued that Capote’s 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s was, in a sense, an attempt to rewrite The Great Gatsby. Sixteen years later, in the midst of a downward creative and personal spiral, Capote went a couple of steps too far in working with the real thing, and he was off the project.

If Scottie Smith did not want the “gangster” elements of her father’s novel to be overemphasized, the selection of Francis Ford Coppola, director of The Godfather, as Capote’s screenwriting replacement would not have reassured her. In actuality, she need not have worried: that film and its sequel, it can be seen now, relate to the same thing as Gatsby: the corruption of The American Dream. Coppola also turned around his screenplay in three weeks, giving Clayton sufficient time to ponder possible improvements (e.g., focusing more intently on Gatsby’s pool as a plot element).

Would any of the other actors considered for the role--Steve McQueen, Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, and Warren Beatty—have worked out better than Robert Redford? Possibly only Beatty, of the same age and glamor as Redford. But Beatty’s terms—direct it himself, with Paramount head Robert Evans playing Gatsby—were non-starters. The evidence is not as clear-cut concerning the others vying with Mia Farrow for Daisy: Faye Dunaway, Candice Bergen, Katharine Ross and Lois Chiles. (As things turned out, Farrow edged out Bergen with what Clayton called a “sensational” test performance, and Chiles had the consolation role of Jordan Baker.)

Mia Farrow’s memoir has suggested that Redford was so engrossed in the Watergate hearings during filming that their scenes together lacked sufficient chemistry. But the problem with the film might have been more basic: faithfulness does not necessarily equate to passion, which lifts what would otherwise be Scott Fitzgerald’s bitterly ironic vision of the moral vacuum in post-WWI America.

Blogging about the 1926 silent Gatsby (lost, save for the trailer), The New Yorker’s Richard Brody suggested three other directors active in 1974 who might have been equal to this material: Robert Altman, Luchino Visconti, and Alain Resnais. But, as I argued in a previous post about An American Tragedy, another filmmaker, still alive during the film’s shooting in 1973, might have been the best choice: George Stevens. A master of movement, sound and editing, Stevens had even been able to find grace notes in Theodore Dreiser’s clunky novel of desire, class and crime when he directed A Place in the Sun. Think what he could have done with Fitzgerald’s lyrical elegy on the same subjects.