Jazz, Prestige, and Five Great Gatsby Film Adaptations

Abstract

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is closely associated with jazz: a controversial musical mode of ‘black’ expression throughout much of the twentieth century, but one that increasingly acquired prestige after World War II. Five film adaptations of Gatsby exist: directed by Herbert Brenon (1926), Elliott Nugent (1949), Jack Clayton (1974), Robert Markowitz (2000), and Baz Lurhmann (2013). Clayton, Markowitz, and Luhrman all foreground jazz in various ways, and even Brenon captures something of its ‘feel’ in his silent film. Only Clayton’s film, however, won an Oscar for Best Adaptation Score. How and why jazz, especially ‘white’ jazz, peaked in Clayton’s Gatsby helps us understand America’s nostalgia both for the 1920s and for much of its ‘Great American Songbook’.