Review of F. Scott Fitzgerald and 'the Last of the Belles'

It didn't help that the print I watched was very bleached out giving the impression the whole thing had been shot under water. Two exceptionally fine actresses plus one wooden actor may well work in some situations but not, alas, here. It was, I confess, new to me and given the date it was televised it was clearly a cynical exercise to get a piece of the hype for the feature film The Great Gatsby which had just been released. The irony of Scott Fitzgerald is that he was a brilliant writer whose colorful and ultimately tragic life always seems to offer more scope than his fiction and invariably defeats all attempts to capture it on celluloid. Even as I write the dreaded Baz Luhrman has yet another version of Gatsby in the can and if it proves as execrable as his Moulin Rouge then no one will come out ahead. The real Zelda, of course, suffered a mental breakdown and Scott burned himself out writing to pay the bills for her hospitalization, turned to drink and died forgotten; Zelda survived him but burned to death when the asylum in which she was incarcerated caught fire. Surely both of them deserve a better memorial than Last of the Belles.