Since Mia Farrow is 66 years old today, it seems a good time to look back to the early 1970’s re-make of “The Great Gatsby” where she played Daisy.
It was a beautiful, but flawed film. Mia Farrow was gorgeous and Robert Redford was at his peak. The art direction was impeccable.
And Nick Carraway, the character I always related to, was beautifully played by Sam Waterson.
F. Scott Fitzgerald has always been my favorite American writer. I’ve had many Nick Carraway nights in my life and I always think of Fitzgerald’s beautiful prose and elegant observations.
Here are a few quotes from “Gatsby”…
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money of their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
“the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age…”
“Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.”
“Can’t repeat the past?… Why of course you can!”
“It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before.”
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one…just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
“I hope she’ll be a fool–that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool… You see, I think everything’s terrible anyhow… And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.”
“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.”
“I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.”
“It takes two to make an accident.”
And my two favorite non-Gatsby Fitzgerald quotes:
“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” (From “The Rich Boy” in the “Sad Young Men” collection.
“There are no second acts in American lives.”
There sadly wasn’t for Scott Fitzgerald- at least while he was alive….all his books were out of print by the time he was 40. His beautiful, destructive wife Zelda was mad and institutionalized.
He died of a heart attack at 44 in Hollywood trying to churn out film scripts for a living…
Anyway, time for a glimpse of the beautiful, flawed film of the one perfect novel Fitzgerald wrote in his beautiful, flawed life….
Lost in the 21st Century 
Remembering “The Great Gatsby”
Since Mia Farrow is 66 years old today, it seems a good time to look back to the early 1970’s re-make of “The Great Gatsby” where she played Daisy.
It was a beautiful, but flawed film. Mia Farrow was gorgeous and Robert Redford was at his peak. The art direction was impeccable.
And Nick Carraway, the character I always related to, was beautifully played by Sam Waterson.
F. Scott Fitzgerald has always been my favorite American writer. I’ve had many Nick Carraway nights in my life and I always think of Fitzgerald’s beautiful prose and elegant observations.
Here are a few quotes from “Gatsby”…
Share this:
Related
Leave a comment
Filed under Books, Entertainment, Movies, Scott's Commentary