The Lady from Shanghai (1947)
Orson Welles liked to tell the story of how he came to make The Lady from Shanghai. He said that in 1946, he was on tour with a stage production of Around the World in Eighty Days when Michael Todd, the producer, went broke in Boston. On a hunch, Welles phoned Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures in Hollywood, telling Cohn that if he would wire him the money to keep his show on the road, he would make a film adaptation of a novel for Columbia. “I’ll write it, direct it, and star in it,” he said.1 When Cohn asked him for the title of the novel he wanted to film, Welles looked at the paperback display next to the pay phone he was using and spied a novel entitled If I Die Before I Wake, by Sherwood King. He gave that title to Cohn. Cohn said that he would send Welles the money he needed, and in return he expected Welles to direct the movie for free, although he would be paid for acting in it and directing it. Consequently, Welles committed himself to filming a book he had not even read—a nice anecdote, but apocryphal.
For a start, King’s novel was not available in paperback in 1946. Moreover, Columbia already owned the screen rights to the novel, so Cohn did not have to purchase them for Welles, as Welles had assumed. Cohn commissioned Welles to make the movie, displacing the original director, William Castle.2 Cohn wanted Rita Hayworth, the reigning star at Columbia, to play the lead. Although Hayworth was Welles’s estranged wife, they both agreed to do the picture. (They divorced when the picture was finished.)
The Lady from Shanghai is often considered a film noir, but, like Criss Cross, it also bears the marks of a gangster film—Hayworth’s character is connected to a Chinatown gang. As Tom Conley writes, “The Lady from Shanghai cannot be easily classified.”3 Neither can Criss Cross (see chapter 5).
Michael O’Hara (Orson Welles), an Irish sailor, is victimized by the “machinations wrought by Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth), in collusion with her husband, Arthur (Everett Sloane), an aging cane-swaggering cripple who happens to be a brilliant criminal lawyer,” and, by his own admission, a canny criminal, like Alonzo Emmerich in The Asphalt Jungle.4 Arthur, together with his slippery law partner, George Grisby (Glenn Anders), swindles their clients, in league with Elsa, who has a gang in Chinatown she can call upon when she is in need, as already mentioned.
Harry Cohn, who once said that movies are not a business, but a racket, was a demanding boss. He did not hesitate to have Welles’s production office bugged so he could monitor Welles’s daily progress on the film. Every day, when Welles reported for work, he would announce, “Welcome to another day of fascinating good listening.”5 Welles used the “super market” approach to adapting a novel into a screenplay, picking what he wanted from King’s novel and bypassing the rest. He also added elements of his own. On the one hand, his Elsa is much the same character that Sherwood King created. On the other hand, the unusual shootout in the “Magic Mirror Maze,” which climaxes the film, is not in the novel at all. Welles’s shooting script is dated September 20, 1946.
Prior to the beginning of principal photography, Welles had Rita Hayworth shorn of her long red tresses and her short hair dyed platinum blond. After all, she could not look like the pinup she had been for American gigs during World War II. Welles explained, “She was going to play the kind of person she’d never been on the screen,” a real villainess.6 “Elsa is the duplicitous and deadly female, . . . all the more dangerous because of her beauty and deceptive nature.”7 She is a femme fatale like Anna in Criss Cross.
Principal photography commenced in November 1946, in Acapulco, with Errol Flynn’s yacht standing in for the Bannister’s yacht, and Flynn as skipper. When Welles and the production unit returned to Hollywood in January 1947, Welles worked with special effects wizard Lawrence Butler (The Thief of Bagdad) to create the Magic Mirror Maze for the last sequence. Cinematographer Charles Lawton Jr. (The Black Arrow) was Columbia’s first-rank director of photography. Welles had Columbia’s best craftsmen working for him. He and Lawton agreed to employ natural lighting for exteriors to give the film the realistic look of a newsreel, which was quite suitable for a gangster film.8
Filming lasted ninety-eight days, ending on January 27, 1947. When Welles showed his rough cut of 155 minutes to Cohn and his minions, the studio chieftain was appalled. He offered $1,000 to anyone who could explain the story to him.9 Cohn assigned his chief editor, Viola Lawrence (Cover Girl) to shorten the film and clarify the plot. She came up with an eighty-six-minute version that was not received well when the studio held a couple of sneak previews—not surprisingly, since removing more than an hour of footage, some of it necessary exposition, did real harm to the narrative continuity of the story line. The film was presumably shortened so drastically so that it could play on a double bill, like a low-budget movie. At any rate, Michael’s narration, which was not in the shooting script, was added at Cohn’s behest to fill in the gaps in the narrative.10 The picture was given a limited release, mostly in neighborhood theaters, and flopped. It cost $2 million to make and took in $1.5 million.11 The profit-minded Cohn never hired Welles again; Welles made only one more movie in Hollywood and then decamped for Europe. It was a decade before he made another Hollywood movie.
The Lady from Shanghai starts out with a night scene in Central Park, in which Elsa is riding in a horse-drawn carriage. A gang of underworld hoodlums pounces on her and drags her into the bushes, but she is rescued by Michael O’Hara. He comments, voice-over on the sound track, that he is “very far from being the hero that his easy victory might make him seem.”12 We later learn that the scuffle in the park was a setup, engineered by Elsa to make it possible for her to meet Michael, so she could embroil him in her scheme to rid herself of Arthur. She, in fact, hired the gang of thugs that pretended to be kidnapping her.
As they ride in her hackney cab, Elsa sketches her background for him. She explains that she was born of white Russian parents in Chifu, and has worked in the “wickedest cities in the world,” including Shanghai. She implies that she was implicated in a vice ring in Shanghai, but the Motion Picture Production Code barred a character from giving specific details about prostitution, “which should never be more than suggested, and only when essential to the plot.”13 She also confesses that she worked in a gambling casino, but adds ruefully, “You need more than luck in Shanghai.” Because Asians were stereotyped at the time as sinister and inscrutable, the fact that Elsa grew up in China gives her an alien, inscrutable quality to an American audience, like Mother Gin Sling in Josef von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture (1941). In sum, Elsa had a nasty, sordid record in China, which is why she fled to the United States.
Elsa later asks Arthur to engage Michael as a crew member for their cruise to San Francisco by way of Acapulco. Arthur walks with two canes, one for each of his crippled legs. He is twisted physically, which suggests that he is also twisted psychologically, for he is an evil and corrupt lawyer. Harry Cohn demanded that Rita Hayworth sing a torch song in the picture, because she had made some successful musicals for Columbia, like Cover Girl. The hypnotic siren song, which she sings aboard the yacht, serves the purposes of the plot by helping to lure Michael to fall for her. The yacht is appropriately named the Circe, a bewitching enchantress in classical lore who transformed heroes into swine.
The yacht stops for a picnic on a Mexican island; when night falls, the picnic on the beach is lit by glowing torches, a fine example of Welles’s use of source lighting in the film. The picnic is a chiaroscuro of torchlight against dark water, an appropriate atmosphere for the Bannisters to discuss their dark pasts. Arthur tells Michael that even though Elsa was involved in some sordid situations in Shanghai, his past legal transactions would shock Michael.
Michael then recalls that in Brazil, he once witnessed an injured shark bleeding in the water; the scent of blood drove the other sharks mad, and they fed on one another. In their frenzy, they even ate at themselves. He concludes, “I never saw anything worse than that—until this little picnic tonight.” Heylin comments astutely that, “Michael is adrift in a sea of sharks,”14 but Michael accurately describes in his shark tale the self-destructive inclinations of the Bannisters, which will become painfully apparent by film’s end.
Michael is infatuated with Elsa but lacks the funds to take her away from Arthur; therefore, he readily “listens to Grisby’s almost farcical proposition about feigning Grisby’s murder, so that he may go off to the South Seas” to escape his shrewish wife and an impending nuclear holocaust. (The film takes place only a few years after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan.) Grisby’s story is filled with discrepancies; for example, he has no wife.15 Nevertheless, Michael even signs a bogus document that states that he accidentally shot Grisby to death.
After the Circe docks in San Francisco, Michael and Elsa have a clandestine meeting at the San Francisco Aquarium to discuss her prospects of escaping Arthur’s clutches. Welles photographed Michael and Elsa separately from his filming of the monstrous fish in the tanks. That way he could splice a shot of the appropriate fish swimming into view that would fit with what the pair were talking about at that moment. Thus, Elsa’s mentioning of her brutal husband coincides with a shot of a shark swimming by.
Sidney Broome (Ted de Corsia), a private detective disguised as the Bannister’s butler, attempts to blackmail Grisby by informing him that he has learned of his plot to murder Arthur Bannister so that Elsa will run away with him, and frame Michael for the crime. Grisby, chagrined and caught off guard, shoots Broome dead. Grisby himself then turns up dead; Michael is accused of killing him because the police have discovered the written agreement Michael made with Grisby to murder him. The police cannot find the gun that killed Grisby, and Arthur, who is defending Michael in court, admits that he cannot prove that Michael is innocent without it.
While waiting for the verdict at his trial, Michael swallows Arthur’s pain pills to make his guards think that he is attempting suicide; he then escapes from the courthouse and flees to Chinatown. As he runs away from the courthouse, Welles’s camera records him as a tiny figure diminishing into the distance. Michael, we realize, is a small man lost in a large and complex world. Elsa follows Michael to Chinatown.
Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton write that it is “regrettable that certain scenes relating to the relation between Miss Bannister and the Chinese community have been cut.”16 Nevertheless, in the Chinatown sequence, there is evidence that Elsa speaks Cantonese fluently and is familiar with many inhabitants of Chinatown, who address her as “Xinlin Zhang.” Elsa’s contacts help her to catch up with Michael in a Chinese playhouse called the Mandarin Theater. She goes backstage and phones Lee (Li) Gong, a Chinatown gang leader who masquerades as the Bannister’s chauffeur, at his mob’s hangout. It is clear that Lee and his racketeers have helped Elsa in the past with her skullduggery.
Elsa says to her underworld crony in Cantonese, “Please help me.” Lee, the mob boss, replies in Cantonese, “You give me a hard time; why should I help you?” We cut to Lee and his cohorts piling into a car, on the way to the Mandarin Theater.17
Elsa finds Michael hiding among the audience at the play and sits next to him. While conferring with Elsa, he discovers a gun in her purse and guesses quite rightly that it is the weapon that was used to murder Grisby; Michael then passes out from the pain pills he swallowed. Lee and his gang appear in the auditorium and, on Elsa’s orders, kidnap Michael. They take him to a deserted amusement park that is closed for the season.
When he awakens, Michael wanders through the park’s Fun House and tumbles down a slippery slide, right through the jaws of a papier-mâché dragon. He ends up in the murky Hall of Mirrors, also known as the Magic Mirror Maze. There he encounters Elsa, who is holding a gun; she shines a flashlight on him while she sheds light on her scheme. Grisby, she explains, “lost his silly head” and shot Broome when Broome attempted to blackmail him. Aware that Grisby was becoming erratic, and therefore unpredictable, she shot him. She then arranged a kangaroo trial, in which Arthur would serve as Michael’s defense lawyer and see to it that Michael took the fall for Grisby’s death.
Suddenly Arthur appears, brandishing a gun and saying, “I knew I would find you two together.” He quite wrongly assumes that Elsa has decided to go away with Michael. “Are you aiming at me, lover? Because I’m aiming at you,” he says. Arthur continues: “Of course, killing you is like killing myself, but, you know, I’m pretty tired of both of us.” The mirror images of Arthur and Elsa are “multiplied prismatically, as they seek to shoot their images to bits,” Conley writes. Mayhem ensues, with “bullets shattering mirrors, until they reach the two spouses.”18 Michael comments in his voice-over that they are “like the sharks, chewing away at each other.”
Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth in Welles’s movie The Lady from Shanghai (1947).
Elsa had hoped to get rid of both Arthur and Grisby—and Michael, too, so that she could be free to spend the Bannister fortune on herself. Instead she lies dying on the floor of the Magic Mirror Maze, amid the blood and broken glass. She futilely calls out to Michael as he goes through the exit. Then she murmurs, “Give my love to the sunrise,” for she realizes that she will never see another one.
The camera rises above the boardwalk of the amusement park as Michael walks toward the dawn of a new day. He muses on the sound track, “Maybe I’ll live so long that I’ll forget her; maybe I’ll die trying.”
The movie was a box-office failure in the United States. Peter Bogdan-ovich cites Welles in his DVD commentary as saying, “The first indication I had that it was a good picture was when I got to Europe after it had opened in the United States.”19 It was very well received, particularly in France, where it was hailed as one of Welles’s major works. Furthermore, the reputation of the film has steadily grown throughout the years. Time’s obituary for Welles singles out the “hall-of-mirrors gunfight in The Lady from Shanghai” as a scene that is unforgettable.20 As David Thomson puts it, the movie has “some of the greatest things Welles would ever do, things so black that they should never be forgotten or explained away.”21 A lady gangster who was involved with a vice ring in China and a Chinese mob in San Francisco, as well as with her lawyer-husband’s schemes, makes quite a leading lady for a gangster picture.
The Great Gatsby (1949)
About the time that Orson Welles was going to Europe to continue his filmmaking career, Paramount was looking for a strong role for Alan Ladd to play in his next picture. They offered him the title role in The Great Gatsby, adapted from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel. As it happened, when Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald moved to Great Neck, Long Island, in 1922, their neighbors were some well-to-do bootleggers. The hero of Fitzgerald’s novel is Jay Gatsby, whose shady activities as a racketeer were modeled on the criminal behavior of the gangsters who surrounded the Fitzgeralds on Long Island.
The key source for Gatsby was Max Gerlach, who lived near the Fitzgeralds in Great Neck. The closest link between Gerlach the bootlegger and Gatsby is a note that Gerlach sent to Fitzgerald on July 20, 1923, which reads, “How are you and the family, old sport?”22 The last two words reflect Gatsby’s way of greeting his friends, which mirrors the studied nonchalance of someone trying too hard to make a good impression on others.
One of Gatsby’s disreputable associates, Meyer Wolfsheim, was also drawn from life. He was based on Arnold Rothstein, a vice lord and bootlegger whom Fitzgerald once met. He was responsible for having fixed the 1919 World Series. When Gatsby introduces Nick Carraway to Wolfsheim in the novel, Nick is astonished to learn that the latter single-handedly engineered the Black Sox Scandal. It had never occurred to Nick that one man could tamper with the faith of millions of people with the “single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.” In this passage, then, Fitzgerald lets the reader know the kind of company that Gatsby, whose real name is Gatz, keeps.
Early in the novel, Gatsby has moved into an estate in West Egg, Long Island, where he meets the book’s narrator, Nick Carraway, his neighbor. He earnestly requests that Nick introduce him to Daisy Buchanan, who lives with her husband Tom in the more fashionable East Egg, across the bay. Gatsby and Daisy were actually lovers during World War I, when Gatsby was in the army, in the days before Daisy married stockbroker Tom Buchanan. Since then, Gatsby has cheapened himself in his efforts to get rich quick so that he can woo Daisy away from Tom.
Screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen coaxed Alan Ladd into reading Fitzgerald’s novel, and Ladd became anxious to do the movie.23 Hence, Paramount decided to make a sound version of The Great Gatsby, which the studio had made as a silent picture (now lost) in 1926. Not all of the versions of The Great Gatsby done for film emphasize that Gatsby was a real gangster and not just a shady businessman. The 1974 movie, for example, only suggests that Gatsby is a mobster by having Nick note that Gatsby’s “butler” is really his bodyguard and carries a gun at all times. But the 1949 film makes no bone about Gatsby’s status as a criminal, as we shall see.
The producer and co-screenwriter was Richard Maibaum, who later scripted several James Bond pictures, starting with Dr. No; Cyril Hume was co-screenwriter. Orson Welles once said, “There is nothing more cinematic than narration, because . . . anything that helps you see more clearly is cinematic, and narration can help you see more clearly.”24 Consequently, Nick Carraway narrates the movie, just as he narrates the novel.
Elliott Nugent, the director, worried that he had bitten off more than he could chew when he took on The Great Gatsby. Nugent may have drawn some reassurance from the fact that the cinematographer, John Seitz (This Gun for Hire), was collaborating with him; Seitz was widely known as the best black-and-white director of photography in Hollywood. The Maibaum–Hume script was a fine piece of work. The screenwriters consulted Owen Davis’s 1926 Broadway version of the novel, which adhered closely to the book in composing the screen adaptation.
The final shooting script includes a prologue that takes place at Gatsby’s burial, where Nick (Macdonald Carey) chats with Jordan Baker (Ruth Hussey), Nick’s erstwhile girlfriend. The date on Gatsby’s tombstone is 1928. Nick and Jordan are among the few mourners present because the word on the street is that Gatsby’s death was presumably a gangland killing.
Nick begins his expository narration by describing the Jazz Age, speaking of “careless dancing, rum runners, and gang wars.” Irene Atkins, whose essay on The Great Gatsby films is excellent, notes that Nick’s remarks are accompanied by “stock shots from old gangster films.”25 In addition, shots of Alan Ladd, clearly visible as he shoots a submachine gun, are interpolated into the stock footage. Gatsby’s criminal connections are stressed more in the 1949 film than in the novel or the other film versions of the book. This was done to capitalize on the “tough guy” image Ladd had established with the mass audience in such films as This Gun for Hire (see chapter 4).
Later in the movie Reba (Jack Lambert), a gangster with whom Gatsby has had some dealings, shows up at one of Gatsby’s posh weekend parties. The surly thug embarrasses Gatsby by drunkenly insisting on discussing “business” and insolently addressing him repeatedly as Gatz (his real surname). Gatsby graciously invites the intruder to join him behind a high hedge in the garden, where he summarily knocks the intruder cold and then discreetly instructs the butler to hustle the offending guest off the property. Although the incident is not in the novel, it is decidedly in keeping with the spirit of the book, since it exemplifies Gatsby’s concerted effort to keep the tainted nature of his gangster activities a secret from Daisy (Betty Field) by dissociating himself from the likes of Reba in public.
This version of The Great Gatsby was directed by Elliott Nugent (The Male Animal), a conscientious craftsman whose films nonetheless seldom turned out to be of more than routine interest. When Nugent directed The Great Gatsby, he was beset with emotional problems. Subject to clinical depression, he was afraid that he would not do justice to the book, which he considered to be “Scott Fitzgerald’s best novel and perhaps the best of all American novels.” As the time for shooting approached, he recalls in his autobiography that he had serious misgivings about his ability to make a worthy motion picture of Gatsby. He even considered committing suicide. Just before shooting started, he writes, “my mood had changed, and I was scoffing at my foolish terror.”26
Richard Maibaum, co-scriptwriter and producer of the film, sensed Ladd’s kinship with the role of Gatsby one evening when he was visiting Ladd at home. The star showed him his expensive wardrobe, including row after row of elegant shirts, thereby recalling Gatsby proudly displaying his wardrobe, particularly his collection of fancy shirts, to Daisy the first time she comes to his mansion. “Not bad for an Okie kid, eh?” Gatsby says. Maibaum remembers Ladd saying to him, “My God!” Maibaum thought to himself, He’s Gatsby!27 In brief, Fitzgerald described Gatsby as an elegant young roughneck, and Ladd filled that role perfectly.
Alan Ladd in the title role of The Great Gatsby (1949), based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Betty Field plays Daisy Buchanan.
Howard Da Silva played George Wilson, the husband of Myrtle Wilson, Tom Buchanan’s mistress, in the 1949 Gatsby, and Meyer Wolfsheim in the 1974 remake, starring Robert Redford. He believed that Ladd’s handling of the part was superior to Redford’s. “As much as I admired Redford as an actor, I felt that he never could play a man from the opposite side of the tracks,” Da Silva explained. “Ladd could and did.”28 Furthermore, although some critics judged that Betty Field (Of Mice and Men) came across as petulant in the role of the haughty Daisy, she “captured the demeanor of the person, and the emotion, behind that demeanor.”29
Some explanation of Gatsby’s past, particularly his youthful association with his mentor, Dan Cody (Henry Hull), is important to the understanding of Gatsby’s character. As a matter of fact, the movie is faithful to its source in its attempt to gradually sketch Gatsby’s background for the viewer with the aid of flashbacks. In one flashback, Gatsby recounts for Nick how a self-made millionaire named Dan Cody took him under his wing when he was still a youngster, allowing him to serve as a mate on the old man’s yacht. It was under Cody’s tutelage that this teenage lad confirmed his resolution to discard his former identity as James Gatz to forge a new personality for himself as Jay Gatsby.
Dan Cody, a rambunctious old sourdough whom Fitzgerald named after Daniel Boone and “Buffalo Bill” Cody, made his fortune in the Wild West. Hence, the advice that this tough old buzzard passes on to his foster son has a ruthless, materialistic ring to it, based as it is on the assumption that one’s personal happiness is derived almost exclusively on the size of his bankroll. Cody was a racketeer who is still referred to as an “old devil.” So in the film, when former serviceman Jay Gatsby, who courted Daisy while he was in the armed forces, learns that he has lost Daisy to millionaire Tom Buchanan, the camera zooms in on a photograph of Cody on his bureau as Jay murmurs, “The old gentleman was right; you can’t compete without money.”
Some of the symbolic nuances of the novel, for instance, the green light that burns each night at the end of the pier fronting the Buchanan mansion, were incorporated into the film’s script. Nick Carraway first notices the green light glowing on Daisy’s dock when he spies Gatsby gazing at it as he stands on his own front lawn, stretching his arms toward the dark water that separates East Egg from West Egg, and thus separates him from Daisy. The color green, because of its association with the renewal of nature in the springtime, implies Gatsby’s hope that he will eventually be able to traverse the distance that divides Daisy’s world from his and possess her once more.30
Another effective visual image incorporated into the film from the book is that of the Valley of Ashes, which lies between New York and Long Island. Sara Mayfield notes that whenever Fitzgerald traveled on a commuter train from Great Neck to the city, he noticed the “wastelands along the tracks.”31 He decided that the desolate area, marred by mounds of ashes and refuse, would be the proper place to locate Wilson’s garage and the shabby flat he shares with Myrtle (Shelley Winters). This highlights the contrast between the dismal environment in which the Wilsons live and the lush landscape surrounding the estates of the Buchanans and their aristocratic coterie. The misguided Gatsby fails to understand that Daisy is willing to carry on a furtive affair with him, but at no time would she seriously consider leaving her husband for a social-climbing gangster, a gate crasher in her privileged world.
Near Wilson’s garage in the Valley of Ashes, in the film as in the book, there is a billboard advertising an oculist by the name of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, which depicts a pair of enormous eyes rimmed in spectacles, surveying the depressing dumping ground that stretches in front of the sign. For Fitzgerald, the eyes had a far-reaching significance. “The great, unblinking eyes, expressionless, looking down upon the human scene,” as Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald’s literary editor at Scribner’s, later described them, symbolized for Fitzgerald “nothing less than the eyes of God Himself.”32 This symbolic meaning of the eyes on the poster, which would be carried over from the novel to the film, is emphasized in the scene in which Wilson, while charging his wife with adultery, points to the eyes staring down at her from the signboard across the way and solemnly reminds her that God sees everything: “You may fool me, but you can’t fool God.”33
The religious implications of the oculist’s billboard are underscored in the movie when Gatsby stops at Wilson’s garage with a sidekick from his army days, Klipspringer (Elisha Cook Jr.), en route to his home in West Egg. Noticing the oculist’s poster, Klipspringer says with a touch of awe in his voice, “Those eyes getcha—like God bought himself a pair of eyeglasses, so He could watch us better.”
Klipspringer’s remark is visualized several times on the screen throughout the course of the movie. The eyes on the billboard are visible as they seemingly “watch” Tom (Barry Sullivan) surreptitiously picking up Myrtle down the road a bit from the gas station for one of their trysts, as well as in the sequence in which Tom finds the battered body of Myrtle, the victim of a hit-and-run driver, lying near the Eckleburg sign.
The oculist’s signboard, which is the last image to appear on the screen at the film’s final fadeout, is used so effectively throughout the film to remind the viewer of Klipspringer’s thought-provoking remark that cinema critic Manny Farber must have been only half-joking when he quipped in his notice for the movie that the “oculist’s billboard, with the enormous spectacled eyes, steals the movie.”34
What Daisy does not know about Gatsby—but that her husband makes it his business to find out—is that most of Gatsby’s fortune is derived from a number of unsavory criminal operations, of which bootlegging is only a part. Gatsby, in short, is a racketeer who is involved with various New York gangsters, like Meyer Wolfsheim. Tom reveals the facts about Gatsby while they are on a foray to New York one summer afternoon. Daisy is overwhelmed by Tom’s revelations; while driving back to Long Island from New York City, she accidentally runs over Tom’s mistress, Myrtle, right in front of Wilson’s gas station. Both Tom and Daisy allow Gatsby to personally assume the blame for the hit-and-run killing because Tom wants to exonerate his beloved Daisy of any guilt.
The coincidence that seems inherent in Tom’s wife being behind the wheel of the car that runs down his mistress was criticized by some critics as too facile and contrived. On the contrary, the screenwriters make it quite clear that Myrtle dashes out onto the highway to try and stop the car speeding past her husband’s gas station because she assumes that it is Tom—and not Daisy—who is driving the automobile. She attempts to flag down the speeding vehicle because she wants Tom to protect her from the wrath of her husband George, who has discovered that she is having an affair with Buchanan. The screenwriters have created a moment of sheer terror with the ill-fated death car, the “frantic expression of Myrtle Wilson, the ugly sound of fender against flesh.”35 Accordingly, the screenwriters have orchestrated this catastrophe with far more plausibility than they have usually been given credit for.
As a result of his taking the rap for Myrtle’s death, Gatsby is shot to death by Myrtle’s revenge-crazed husband, George. He shoots the man he believes is responsible for his wife’s death. Jay Gatsby, he is convinced, robbed him of the one thing of value he possessed in his otherwise miserable existence. Why should we assume that Myrtle meant any less to George than Daisy meant to Gatsby? Hence, after killing Gatsby, George turns the gun on himself and commits suicide.
The 1949 version of The Great Gatsby ends with Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker at Gatsby’s graveside; after bidding good-bye to Jay (née James Gatz), the two realize that they are in love and decide to marry. By contrast, the novel ends with Nick going back to the Midwest, where he came from, without Jordan. American films at the time still tended to have happy endings because the studios feared that audiences would reject downbeat conclusions. Consequently, Paramount’s front office thought it wise that Nick and Jordan get together at the end, although the novel has no such upbeat ending.
As for Gatsby, one of the mourners at his sparsely attended funeral delivers a benediction for him that appears at the end of the book: “The poor son-of-bitch.” This phrase was repeated by fiction writer and screenwriter Dorothy Parker at Fitzgerald’s wake, which attracted few mourners in Hollywood, where he finished his career as a failed screenwriter in 1940.36
It is easy to agree with the critics who see the 1949 edition of The Great Gatsby as a serious attempt to do justice to Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, without sweeping under the rug the fact that Gatsby was a gangster. “Somehow,” Nugent concludes, “we got the picture finished. While it never completely satisfied me, it received good reviews and was a financial success.”37 Without question, the 1949 Gatsby was the most distinguished picture Nugent ever turned out, and Ladd’s portrayal of Gatsby has come to be considered, along with his role as Raven in This Gun for Hire, one of his best performances of his career, what some have called an example of perfect casting.
The fifth motion-picture version of The Great Gatsby premiered in 2013. For the record, the Australian director Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!) selected Leonardo DiCaprio for the title role, which is something less than perfect casting. Like Robert Redford in the 1974 Gatsby, DiCaprio is a bit too slick and sleek to be Fitzgerald’s Gatsby. Since the 1974 and 2013 movies, which are in color, have overshadowed the 1949 Ladd version, I have given it a reassessment here. What’s more, the Ladd film is essentially a gangster picture, with Gatsby portrayed as a “surly, social-climbing bootlegger.”38 Hence it belongs in this book.