AT THE MOVIES

“Clark Gable wants to do it but Paramount is playing dog-in-the-manger about the rights,” Fitzgerald wrote to a Gatsby fan in 1938. “Griffith”—Edward H. Griffith, the director of Honeymoon in Bali, on which Fitzgerald worked uncredited—“has always wanted to do ‘The Great Gatsby’ over again as a talkie,” Fitzgerald wrote to a Hollywood agent a year later. In the 1940s Raymond Chandler thought he had a chance at it, but option conflicts sidelined the project. It wasn’t until 1949 that Paramount went ahead with a picture starring Alan Ladd as Gatsby and as Daisy Betty Field, a stage