Elliott Nugent

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

The Cat and the Canary

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Joyce in bed with a disembodied hand making for her throat

Is there anything as unfashionable right now as a Bob Hope movie? The Cat and the Canary is as good a place to start as any if you want to start understanding the huge appeal Hope once had. Bear in mind that this movie was made in 1939, before he teamed up with Bing Crosby in the Road movies, which propelled the familiar Hope character – quipping and cowardly – to even greater heights. It’s a remake of a 1927 silent movie of the same name by Paul Leni, one of the great directors, largely forgotten these days because he died young, aged 44, a year after he arrived in Hollywood just as … Read more