Movies about the rich.

Exhibit A: The Magnificent Ambersons, which I neglected to say is about "the decline of the fortunes of the wealthy Amberson family" (see Tim Dirks' exhaustive summary).

Exhibit B: A Place in the Sun (1951 Tagline: I'm in trouble, George... bad trouble), based on Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925), a nifty summary of which by one Jude Davies is available from www.LitEncyc.com, which I can only access here. (The original works again.) JD says, "An American Tragedy movingly illustrates the damage done by the American ideology of success." The novel is in turn based on the story of the Chester Gillette � Grace Brown murder case.

As for the movie, Montgomery Clift looked pretty sleazy back then. Elizabeth Taylor sure was pretty (God must love her to turn her into what she is now, eh?). Was there some joke about having Raymond Burr's character, a detective-like prosecutor surnamed Marlowe? (And is this role what got him typecast as a legal type?) Shelley Winters wasn't bad, but I kept thinking of her role in Alfie (1966). Here's a sad sign of senility: I could only remember her as the woman who spurned a younger man, and didn't remember who that was. Now I see there are some interesting parallels there. It's as if Winters has in Alfie aged into a middle-aged slut. On the other hand, Michael Caine tries to do what the Monty should've, so I guess there's some progress there.

Of particular interest to me is that An American Tragedy involves Cortland, New York, where I went to high school. It's a shame to say I never read the novel, even though my mother, then a high school teacher in another school, assigned it to her students. And now her dementia doesn't allow her to even recognize the name of the book.

Exhibit C: The Great Gatsby (1974), based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, with the script credited to Francis Ford Coppola. Maybe it's because I'm getting a little tired of the adoration of the rich, but I couldn't help but feel the actors here were basically playing their regular roles. Robert Redford did the handsome guy thing he always did, Mia Farrow was the flighty sparrow, Bruce Dern the turd, Karen Black the woman who's not as pretty as she thinks she is (although later she got pretty scary-looking), and Edward Herrmann the geek. OK, I did get a kick out of seeing Herrmann. And seeing a young Sam Waterston as the narrator was funny, especially as he's much better looking now, 30 years later in Law & Order (which incidentally I like better than most of the movies I see these days).

At first I was quite annoyed with the movie, given my impression of Fitzgerald as an idiot besotted with the wealthy. While he did write a story ("The Rich Boy") that began, "The rich are different from you and me," it was in the story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" that Hemingway wrote, "someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money." This is even though Scott's story continues, "They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand." See John Updike's Poor little rich boy.

Anyway, I don't know if Coppola flubbed the closing of the movie, or if the novel's ending wasn't cinematic enough, but I really missed the famous last lines of the novel. Gatsby was pining for Daisy, the woman who long ago spurned him because he was too poor (a rejection that spurred him to become rich), and looked yearningly at her dock across the water from the mansion that he now has. But now he's discovered she's no damn good

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter � tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning �

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.