Background
Clayton, Jack was born on March 1, 1921 in Brighton, Sussex, England.
Clayton, Jack was born on March 1, 1921 in Brighton, Sussex, England.
Despite a lauded debut, curiously identified in some quarters as a revived British cinema, Clayton bad difficulty sustaining projects. He was for many years an assistant producer—raucously called for throughout Reat the Devil (54, John Huston), and also involved on Moulin Rouge (53, Huston) and I Am a Camera (55, Henry Cornelius). He directed the short. Bespoke Overcoat, in 1955 and always pursued the same neatly wrapped up and faintly realized exercises in literary emotion. Room at the Top was as brutal, inauthentic, and complacent as its book; The Innocents is an Arts Council-like piece of Jamesiana. Only The Pumpkin Eater is touching, because of the forlorn, bitter gulfs between Anne Bancroft and fames Mason, Peter Finch and Maggie Smith.
Claytons six-year silence before Gatsby was warning of that disastrous film made with such erroneous and vulgar care. Gatsby is an unfilmable novel, if only because the last pages are so abstract and because Fitzgerald took great risks in leaving out things that a film must scrape together for fear of seeming arty, and enervated. If vou wish to see the film of Gatsby, go to The Magnificent Ambersons (42, Orson Welles). Clavton’s movie has one salutarv peak, when Robert Redford’s Gatsby laments, "It’s all been a terrible mistake.”
Married Christine Norden Clayton (divorced). Married Katherine Kath Clayton (divorced).