Tale of the times

Feature F Scott Fizgerald makes a return to the big screen with Benjamin Button topping nomination lists and a planned remake of The Great Gatsby.

The 1949 film version of The Great Gatsby, starring Alan Ladd, has been criticised for skirting the novel's central theme and miscasting Betty Field in the role of Daisy.

When the Oscar nominations were announced last week, there was one film that beat even Slumdog Millionaire's 10 nominations. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button topped the list with 13, just one shy of the all-time nominations record, which is held jointly by Titanic and All About Eve.

Benjamin Button, starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, was directed by Fight Club's David Fincher, and is adapted from a short story by F Scott Fitzgerald. Meanwhile, Baz Luhrmann, currently riding high in the public consciousness with his epic film Australia, has acquired the rights to remake Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. It's not difficult to see why the American writer, born in 1896, is back in vogue: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is about a man (Pitt) who ages backwards. It's an ideal tale for an era obsessed with ageing and mortality. The Great Gatsby is concerned with the excess and slippery morality of America's Roaring Twenties, which strikes a chord as we leave a similar age of prosperity. Today's filmmakers, it seems, find Fitzgerald's work a relevant vehicle.

But then, Fitzgerald has always been relevant. In the silent movie era, his novels were adapted for film almost as soon as he'd finished writing them. Just months separated the publication of his second book, The Beautiful and the Damned, and its celluloid version in 1922. A thinly veiled autobiography, it tracks a socialite, his failing relationship, and the lives of the elite in the eastern United States - not always in the most flattering terms.

One might wonder how such complexities could be transposed to the silent movie, but William A Seiter (who would go on to direct John Wayne, Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire and Henry Fonda) handled the doomed relationship of the characters Anthony and Gloria Patch so well that it was no surprise when the leading man of the silent movie era Kenneth Harlan and the actress Marie Provost actually married in real life. And then divorced.

Four years later, and again just a year after the publication of the book, the first film adaptation of The Great Gatsby hit silent screens. Directed by Herbert Brenon (who also took on the first silent version of Peter Pan), it has gone down in film history as one of the great "lost" films. Not a single print is thought to exist, though there is a one minute trailer carefully preserved by America's Library of Congress.

But, of course, the story remained in print. And though it wouldn't be until 1949 - nine years after Fitzgerald's death - that someone took on The Great Gatsby again, film and the author were inextricably linked in the 1930s. He worked as an uncredited writer for MGM on the Oscar-nominated Three Comrades and Marie Antoinette, among many others. There is a certain irony in Fitzgerald's writing about the appalling excesses of the age and then finding he had to crank out film scripts to keep himself in the manner to which he had become accustomed, but he spent the latter part of the 1930s doing just that.

Fitzgerald reportedly found such work depressing, but it did have one use: his unfinished fifth and final novel, The Last Tycoon, was based on the life of the film executive Irving Thalberg. The 1976 film version would go on to be the On the Waterfront director Elia Kazan's last film, but it's The Great Gatsby that continued to fascinate film studios. The black and white 1949 version, directed by Elliott Nugent, concentrates - perhaps to a fault - on the sentimental, romantic side of the novel. Alan Ladd plays the tragic hero Gatsby, a mysteriously elegant self-made millionaire whose riches fail to bring him closer to his goal of winning his lost love, Daisy.

And Ladd, a charismatic leading light of post-Second World War cinema, suits this version, which skirts around the hedonistic parties of the prohibition-era elite, and ignores the central theme of Gatsby being as much a victim of money as he is love. It doesn't help, either, that the part of Daisy was so poorly cast: Betty Field was derided in almost every review, then and since, as being unbelievable as someone whom Gatsby loves beyond everything else.

At least such lukewarm reaction meant that a benchmark adaptation was still to be made. And certainly the 1974 version had an impressive pedigree behind it. It was no black and white potboiler, but instead was something of a tortured production that gave credence to a long-held presumption that Fitzgerald's works present huge challenges to filmmakers. First, Truman Capote was employed to write the script, but then fired by the studio for controversial deviations from the novel. He was replaced by Francis Ford Coppola. This all makes the film worthy of attention, one might think, but the Godfather director revealed on his most famous film's DVD commentary that his involvement did not go smoothly. "Not that the director paid any attention to [the script]," he said. "The script that I wrote did not get made."

That director was Jack Clayton, and he perhaps should have realised from the casting difficulties alone that this version of The Great Gatsby was going to be a nightmare: the producer Robert Evans wanted his wife, Ali MacGraw, to play Daisy, but she ran off with Steve McQueen during the filming of The Getaway (which she'd only agreed to do as a filler because of the script issues in The Great Gatsby). Mia Farrow was then chosen for the role, but then she became pregnant - hence the almost ridiculous amount of close-ups. And though Robert Redford might seem a starry choice for Gatsby, even he was the third pick after Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson.

Despite its Redford/Farrow billing, the film flopped massively (the two Oscars it won were for costume design and music). This was largely due to an off-puttingly lavish adaptation which somehow managed to remain faithful to the mechanics of the plot without digging deeper into what it's actually about. Redford did not get beneath the monied persona to reveal the deep despair of Gatsby, and Farrow's performance failed to truly engage with the character. Clayton ended up being hugely derided for wasting these talents, and his career never really recovered.

A year later, in The Last Tycoon, Nicholson finally made it into a Fitzgerald-inspired film alongside Robert De Niro, Robert Mitchum and Donald Pleasence. Once again, the screenwriter had the gravitas Fitzgerald deserved - this time it was Harold Pinter - and once again the director didn't quite get to the heart of the matter. The story is told but the subtext, the failure of the American dream, doesn't resonate.

Since then, there have been a few TV adaptations of Fitzgerald's minor short stories and a relatively low-key made-for-TV version of The Great Gatsby in 2000, directed by Robert Markovitz and starring Toby Stephens and Mira Sorvino. Once again, the story was adhered to but the acting was on the schmaltzy, comfortable side. So what direction might Baz Luhrmann take? Early signs are good. Luhrmann was very keen to suggest recently that this was a parable for our times rather than merely a character study of a wealthy man who can't get a girl.

"If you wanted to show a mirror to people that says, 'You've been drunk on money', they're not going to want to see it," he told The Hollywood Reporter recently. "But if you reflected that mirror on another time they'd be willing to. People will need an explanation of where we are and where we've been, and The Great Gatsby can provide that explanation." It certainly can. But Luhrmann is famously a rather slow, fastidious filmmaker, so by the time we get to see what could be the definitive version of The Great Gatsby, the boom times may well be back.

In the meantime, of course, there's The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, and, next year, The Beautiful and the Damned, which will be not so much an adaptation of Fitzgerald's novel as a biopic of his wife Zelda's life, starring Keira Knightley. It's a perfect piece of casting for a tale of a 20th century Jazz Age socialite. The Beautiful and the Damned, Benjamin Button and Gatsby suggest not only that Fitzgerald continues to hold a fascination in the 21st century, but that his tales and, indeed, life are about to be given the treatment they deserve. Gatsby is not called "great" for nothing.