The Not-So-Great Gatsby

...It was talked about, in large part, because Paramount mounted a sales campaign that would have awed Willy Loman, which led in turn to pre-release theatrical commitments adding up to a record $18.6 million, almost three times the film's $6.4 million cost...

...whenever she opens her mouth you want to hide under the seat...

...Inevitably, she reminds you of Lena Lamont in Singin' in the Rain...

...Now that everything is out in the open, it must be reported that the rumors did the movie no justice at all: The Great Gatsby is worse than anyone imagined, so embarrassingly bad that the woman who sat next to me felt obliged to volunteer that she was sniffling because of a bad cold, definitely not from any emotional response to what has to be the most disappointing film in most people's memory...

...However, since his performance makes him a more sympathetic character than Gatsby or Daisy, this unfortunately destroys the nuances of the book, and hence this movie adaptation of one of the most moving of American novels ends up totally unmoving and totally unreal...

...If one feature can be singled out as the film's worst, Mia Farrow's performance is it...

...Perhaps the best of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels, the story of ever-so-wealthy, ever-so-mysterious Jay Gatsby's love for Daisy Buchanan previously had been filmed in 1926 and 1949, but never with anything like the fuss that attended this third try...

...For instance: • Gatsby standing on his dock and clenching his fist, like the evil landlord in The Perils of Pauline, at the green light on the Buchanan's pier...

...Gatsby is not a failure of expectations, it is a failure of moviemaking...

...Then Ali ran off with Steve McQueen, and after much gnashing of teeth Mia Farrow was cast as the lady, Robert Redford as Gatsby, Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplay, and Briton Jack Clayton settled down to direct what Evans liked to call "the most talked about film since Gone with the Wind...

...With a fake British accent and an insufferable set of mannerisms, her Daisy is nothing more than a silly, insipid twerp, spoiled to the point where all attractiveness is lost...

...Yes, the film at least looks nice, and the camera does not let you forget it as it endlessly and lovingly caresses all the fancy rooms and fancier cars and gaudy clothes for a stultifying two and a half hours...

...Not that he was given much help by screenwriter Coppola, an Academy Award winner for writing Patton before directing The Godfather...

...Even worse is Karen Black's Myrtle, an amateurish portrayal of a shrew that at times seems as bad as Mia's Daisy...

...Coppola ended up with ;i script so wooden that it crushes all the substance out of the novel, filled with lines like "Do you remember when an hour alone with you was an impossibility?'" Together Clayton and Coppola have come up with a whole series of touches that are incredibly maudlin or inane or both...

...In addition, the studio rigged up a deal with four firms which, in the words of Variety, would "push the 'Gatsby' look, lifestyle, and logo...

...Perhaps the Teflon pots will end up in better shape...

...A completely gratuitous scene in which Myrtle Wilson (Karen Black) breaks a window, cuts her hand, and wolfishly sucks the blood as the background music rises to a cheap, melodramatic crescendo...

...Just about everyone who was anyone in Hollywood seemed enamored of either acting in or directing the thing, but unfortunately for actresses interested in playing the ethereal Daisy, the inside track unquestionably belonged to Ali Mac-Graw, married to Bob Evans, production chief at Kenneth Turan is both a film critic and a staff writer for Potomac, The Washington Post magazine...

...A giant closeup of Gatsby's and Daisy's fingers getting closer and closer, but, you guessed it, just not being able to touch...

...For example, an old version of Moby Dick, with John Barry-more as Ahab, though it gives the good captain a last name and an evil brother, lets him kill the whale, and even presents him with a sweetheart he can marry at the finale, is a success by its own zany lights...

...In the hectic final weeks before the long-awaited New York premiere, rumors, ever the bane of the movie industry, began circulating that perhaps Gatsby was not so great after all...

...A movie can depart totally from its source but still succeed on its own terms if it is made with elan and skill...

...Robert Redford at least looks like Gatsby, but his dialogue is so inevitably wooden that he, too, sinks like a stone...

...he allows even bit actors to overdo things shamelessly...

...America, in the studio's proud word, was "Gatsbyized," and what with cover stories in Time and Newsweek, the obligatory double-page advertisement in the Sunday New York Times which announced a whopping $6 reserved seat admission, and advance references popping up everywhere, a person could be forgiven for feeling he had seen the picture before it had been released...

...Never, we are promised, have we seen anything like Love Story or The Godfather, never have we experienced anything like Last Tango in Paris or The Exorcist, never will we forget whatever it is they are pushing this time...

...And this time, what they are pushing is The Great Gatsby...

...The best performance in the film turns out to be Bruce Dern's Tom Buchanan...

...There was a liquor company ("Gatsby's parties . . . Ballantine was there"), a men's sportswear concern, a chain of beauty salons ("After you've seen The Great Gatsby, get the cut"), even a new kind of Teflon cookware in "classic white in the tradition of The Great Gatsby...

...So much time and effort were spent merchandising the product that apparently no one bothered to make sure the product was worth it...

...The camera portentously panning to a dead bird as narrator Nick Carraway tells us about the end of Gatsby's parties...

...Director Jack Clayton, a usually competent professional who once upon a time did Room at the Top, had not made a feature for seven years before tackling Gatsby, and plainly he was out of his depth...

...If this film doesn't end her career, there is no justice in Hollywood...

...Paramount, the studio which just happened to be making the picture...

...With Stephen F. Zito he is writing a book titled "Now You See It: American Pornographic Films and the People Who Make Them," which Praeger plans to publish later this year...

...There is a real feeling of reverence here, but it is a reverence gone sour, a reverence that has turned a novel that is not a bit dated into a museum piece of a movie, with even the actors becoming little more than props, well-dressed prisoners in a gilded cage...

...A lot of money but little feeling have been used to turn a good book into a bad soap opera, and there are more than enough people around to share the blame...

...All of this is not a complaint that the movie dared to depart from the book's sacred text...