1926 film directed by Herbert Brenon
The Great Gatsby
is a 1926 American
silent
drama film
directed by
Herbert Brenon
.
It was the first film adaptation of the 1925 novel
of the same name
by
F. Scott Fitzgerald
.
Warner Baxter
portrayed
Jay Gatsby
and
Lois Wilson
portrayed
Daisy Buchanan
.
The film was produced by
Famous Players?Lasky
, and distributed by
Paramount Pictures
.
The Great Gatsby
is now considered
lost
.
A vintage movie trailer displaying short clips of the film still exists.
Plot
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The film is an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel where
Midwesterner
Nick Carraway is lured into the lavish world of his
Long Island
neighbor, Jay Gatsby. Soon, however, Carraway sees through the cracks of Gatsby's
nouveau riche
existence, where obsession, madness, and tragedy await.
The film's plot diverges from Fitzgerald's novel in several key respects: Daisy renounces Gatsby when she learns he is a
bootlegger
as opposed to when he demands she declare that she never loved Tom.
Daisy also attempts to confess publicly to killing Myrtle Wilson but fails to do so.
She later departs New York City with her husband Tom prior to Gatsby's murder by George Wilson and, consequently, Daisy has no knowledge of Gatsby's death.
The final shot of the film shows "Daisy and her husband Tom and their tot draped beautifully on the porch of their happy home."
Cast
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Production
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The screenplay was written by Becky Gardiner and
Elizabeth Meehan
and was based on
Owen Davis
' stage play treatment of
The Great Gatsby
. The play, directed by
George Cukor
, opened on
Broadway
at the
Ambassador Theatre
on February 2, 1926. Shortly after the play opened,
Famous Players?Lasky
and
Paramount Pictures
purchased the film rights for $45,000.
The film's director
Herbert Brenon
designed
The Great Gatsby
as lightweight, popular entertainment, playing up the party scenes at Gatsby's mansion and emphasizing their scandalous elements. The film had a running time of 80 minutes, or 7,296 feet.
Reception
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Film critics
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Mordaunt Hall
?
The New York Times
'
first regular
film critic
?wrote in a contemporary review that the film was "good entertainment, but at the same time it is obvious that it would have benefited by more imaginative direction."
He lamented that Herbert Brenon's direction lacked subtlety and that none of the actors convincingly developed their characters.
He faulted a scene where Daisy gulps absinthe: "She takes enough of this beverage to render the average person unconscious. Yet she appears only mildly intoxicated, and soon recovers."
Hall also describes a scene in which Gatsby "tosses twenty-dollar gold pieces into the [swimming pool] water, and you see a number of the girls diving for the coins. A clever bit of comedy is introduced by a girl asking what Gatsby is throwing into the water, and as soon as this creature hears that they are real gold pieces she unhesitatingly plunges into the pool to get a share. Gatsby appears to throw the money into the water with a good deal of interest, whereas it might perhaps have been more effective to have him appear a little bored as he watched the scramble of the men and women."
In contrast to Hall's mixed review, journalist
Abel Green
's November 1926 review published in
Variety
was more positive.
Green deemed Brenon's production to be "serviceable film material" and "a good, interesting gripping cinema exposition of the type certain to be readily acclaimed by the average fan, with the usual
Long Island
parties and the rest of those high-hat trimmings thrown in to clinch the argument."
Presumably in reaction to Daisy Buchanan rejecting Gatsby when she discovers that he is a bootlegger,
the
Variety
reviewer wryly observed that Gatsby's "
Volstead violating
"
bootlegging
was not "a heinous crime despite the existence of a
federal statute
which declares it so."
The reviewer praised Warner Baxter's portrayal of Gatsby and Neil Hamilton's portrayal of Nick Carraway but found Lois Wilson's interpretation of Daisy to be needlessly unsympathetic.
Fitzgeralds
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Although the film received generally positive reviews from critics, novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald purportedly loathed Brenon's cinematic adaptation of his novel.
While living in a Los Angeles bungalow with his wife
Zelda Sayre
in early 1927, the couple viewed the film at a nearby theater and walked out midway through the screening.
"We saw
The Great Gatsby
at the movies," Zelda later wrote to their daughter Scottie and her nanny. "It's
ROTTEN
and awful and terrible and we left."
Civic groups
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Following the release of the film,
women's civic groups
?such as the Better Films Board of the Women's Council?lodged letters of protest to the studio and producers in December 1926.
The women objected that the film depicted Daisy Buchanan having sexual relations with Gatsby
prior to marriage
and that Tom Buchanan was shown engaging in
extramarital sex
with Myrtle.
The civic group declared that, although "some homes are not sacred, some women not pure and some men not clean," it was nonetheless morally wrong "in the name of amusement to portray stories of this undesirable life, to hold it up before the theater going public for the [morally] weak to become interested in."
They demanded that future motion pictures depict "the decent, clean American life, which if our nation is to stand, must remain clean and decent as it was at the beginning of our Republic."
Preservation status
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Professor
Wheeler Winston Dixon
, the James Ryan Professor of Film Studies at the
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
made extensive but unsuccessful attempts to find a surviving print. Dixon noted that there were rumors that a copy survived in an unknown archive in Moscow but dismissed these rumors as unfounded.
However, the
trailer
has survived and is one of the 50 films in the three-disc, boxed DVD set
More Treasures from American Film Archives
, 1894-1931
(2004), compiled by the
National Film Preservation Foundation
from five American film archives. The trailer is preserved by the
Library of Congress
(AFI/Jack Tillmany collection) and has a running time of one minute.
It was featured on the
Blu-ray
released by
Warner Home Video
of director
Baz Luhrmann
's 2013 adaptation of
The Great Gatsby
as a special feature.
Gallery
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References
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Notes
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- ^
In this silent version, Jay Gatsby's business associate Meyer Wolfsheim is changed to a
White Anglo-Saxon Protestant
and rechristened Charles Wolf.
Citations
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Bibliography
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- Bennett, Carl (May 6, 2010).
"Progressive Silent Film List:
The Great Gatsby
"
.
Silent Era
. Retrieved
January 7,
2019
.
- Dixon, Wheeler Winston
(2003).
"The Three Film Versions of The Great Gatsby: A Vision Deferred"
.
Literature Film Quarterly
. United Kingdom:
Routledge
. Archived from
the original
on June 5, 2013
. Retrieved
June 6,
2022
.
- Green, Abel
(November 24, 1926).
"The Great Gatsby"
.
Variety
. Los Angeles, California
. Retrieved
June 6,
2022
– via Internet Archive.
- Hall, Mordaunt
(November 22, 1926).
"Gold and Cocktails"
.
The New York Times
. New York City
. Retrieved
January 7,
2019
.
- Hamilton, Ian (1990).
Writers in Hollywood, 1915-1951
. New York:
Harper & Row
.
ISBN
0-06-016231-7
– via Internet Archive.
- Mellow, James R.
(1984).
Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
. Boston, Massachusetts:
Houghton Mifflin Company
. p. 281.
ISBN
0-395-34412-3
– via Internet Archive.
Hollywood," [Zelda] wrote Scottie, "is not gay like the magazines say but very quiet. The stars almost never go out in public and every place closes at mid-night." They had been to see a screening of
The Great Gatsby
, she wrote: "It's
ROTTEN
and awful and terrible and we left.
- "The Great Gatsby / Herbert Brenon [motion picture]"
.
Performing Arts Encyclopedia
. Washington, D.C.:
The Library of Congress
. January 1, 2017
. Retrieved
January 7,
2019
.
- "The Great Gatsby (1926) - Production Code Administration Records"
.
Margaret Herrick Library Digital Collections
.
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
. December 15, 1926. p. 1
. Retrieved
March 29,
2020
.
- Tredell, Nicolas (February 28, 2007).
Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: A Reader's Guide
. London:
Continuum Publishing
. pp. 93?96.
ISBN
978-0-8264-9010-0
. Retrieved
June 6,
2022
– via Internet Archive.
External links
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]
Wikisource
has original text related to this article:
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