Betty Field

The Great Gatsby

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Jay and Daisy face to face

This is The Great Gatsby no one talks about. Not the Baz Luhrmann one from 2013, or the Robert Redford one from 1974, but the 1949 version starring Alan Ladd as Jay Gatsby, the poor boy made good who’s trying to chummy up to old money and finds it comes at a cost. In 1949, films about the jazz age were largely off-limits and so to get this film made, a moralising preamble and postscript was added – as if F Scott Fitzgerald’s original book weren’t a cautionary tale to start with. Ask AI to summarise the difference between this film and the book, as I just did, and it really goes off … Read more

Blues in the Night

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The band all together playing

A jazzy, noirish take on the “getting the band together” drama, Blues in the Night benefits from crisp images and snappy dialogue. On the downside, everyone in it is about ten years too old for their role, there is quite a lot of “hep cat daddio” slang to digest and the racial politics are a mess. But if you can take the rough with the smooth, it’s bright and well paced, with a good plot, interesting acting and even a few good tunes – look on it as a semi-musical, maybe. It’s also the film that convinced Elia Kazan to pack in acting and take up directing. He says he was convinced he … Read more

The Southerner

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Nona (Betty Field) and Sam (Zachary Scott)

Fleeing France as the Nazis advanced, French director Jean Renoir went to Hollywood, where he tried to make more of the lyrical, socially engaged films that had made his name back home. 1945’s The Southerner was about as close as he got, but to make his third US feature he had to exit the studio system and do it as an independent. What do you know, it was his best received film, three-times Oscar-nominated, including one for Renoir himself as director. It was as near as he’d ever get to an Academy Award. Being a second-string production made outside the system meant not having access to big-name talent, but Zachary Scott and Betty … Read more

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