What'll I do
When you are far away
And I'm so blue
What'll I do?

What'll I do
When I am wondering who
Is kissing you
What'll I do?

What'll I do
With just a photograph
To tell my troubles too?

When I'm alone
With only dreams of you
That won't come true
What'll I do?

Irving Berlin (1923).

Like so many others, I came to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in late adolescence and loved it on the spot, altho’ the more grown-up bits may well have passed me by, like Nick Carraway’s mysterious — and possibly ambiguous — escapade in the lift: ‘keep your hands off the lever’. And have loved it ever since. I try to read it every year if I can. Like Le Grand Meaulnes (1913), Goodbye to All That (1929), A Farewell to Arms (1929), The Go-Between (1953), The Secret History (1992) and Brideshead Revisited (1945), The Great Gatsby is a book which needs to be read at the age of seventeen or so, and like Hemingway’s Montparnasse, becomes a ‘Moveable Feast’, to carry around for the rest of your life. Oh, the naive romanticism of youth! That strange combination of optimism, rebellion and conformity.

And for those of us growing up in the 1970s and 80s, Jack Clayton’s more or less faithful adaptation, The Great Gatsby (1974), became the definitive Gatsby, at least for our generation, despite the significant reservations, even downright hostility, found online today — especially from a younger audience. The Great Gatsby, of course, is so famous (often touted as the greatest American novel ever written), that anybody and everybody with an American education has an opinion on it, making it a notoriously difficult film to get right. It has been adapted for the silver screen twice before: in the silent film of 1926 (which no longer exists) and in 1949, subsequently resurfacing in 2000 and then again, in 2013, in Baz Luhrmann’s blingy production shot in 3D, starring Leonardo di Caprio. If Sir Arthur Bryant described the Regency as The Age of Elegance, then we might label our own rollicking, superficial, vulgar, batshit-crazy era as The Age of the Coarse. And Clayton’s more refined Gatsby undoubtedly reflects the 1970s obsession with the age of Prohibition in America, the Jazz Age — an idea we explored in our recent post on The Sting (1973), demonstrated, I think, beautifully by the Disco Deco cover design of the Penguin paperback film tie-in, illustrated below. The 1970s was far more understated than our current age, both in fashion and on the screen, despite the flares, the Concorde collars, the Windsor knots, lava lamps, flowery wallpaper and polyester hair, which production designers and art directors so often ham up and get wrong. Or maybe they don’t care: it’s all about ‘making things current’, as Mr. Cowell might say: one of the problems I have with biopics.

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Ralph Lauren, famously, is often mentioned in the same breath as both The Great Gatsby (1974) and Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977): a connexion which helped propel both the man and his brand to international fame: the men’s clothes: the pink and brown pin-striped suits, the gold tie, the double-breasted waistcoat, the white golfing cap, the co-respondent shoes and the Turnbull & Asser shirts: ‘“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before”’. The costume designers, actually, were Theoni Aldredge (for Gatsby) and Ruth Morley (for Annie Hall), both of whom used some of Ralph Lauren’s clothes in their films.

And 1973/4 was a notable year for the American ‘Between the Wars’ aesthetic, for films set (or in the case of Orient Express, partly set) in the America of the 1920s and 30s: The Sting (1973), Chinatown (1974), The Waltons (1974), The Godfather Part II (1974), Murder on the Orient Express (1974) (a film we will return to a later date) — and of course, The Great Gatsby, set in 1922. The reactionary nostalgia of the 1970s also helped, I think. The backlash to the zany, psychedelic, optimistic Swinging Sixties, fuelled by drug abuse, the oil crisis and Watergate: a return to the past (albeit a romantic interpretation of the past), of golden afternoons and romantic cinematography: backlighting, soft focus, lens flare and filter effects — sparkling light on silver — and the exquisite, rather 70s, and not especially historical set design: the interiors of Tom and Daisy’s house in upper class East Egg actually filmed amongst the stucco’ d grandeur of Heatherden Hall, Pinewood (‘London, England’), with Gatsby’s pile transformed from a spanking brand-new French château (that ‘raw beard of ivy’) to the Beaux-Arts splendour of Rosecliff, Newport, Rhode Island:

A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.