PERFECTLY CAST: DRAKE’S FOR THE RAKE CORDUROY SUIT AND ACCESSORIES

The problem with translating from print to screen is that they always get the casting wrong. You don’t select a genetically overindulged golden god-Adonis like Robert Redford to play Gatsby. He should have played Tom Buchanan — rich, privileged and, like DJ Khaled, always on the side that wins. But if you read Fitzgerald’s description, Gatsby should be dark, possibly even Semitic, at once haunted, at once hopeful, at once corrupt, at once idealistic — a devotee of the great orgiastic light eternally burning across the shore. So when, in 1966, Mike Nichols was casting, from a script written by Buck Henry and Calder Willingham from the 1963 novel by Charles Webb, his stroke of genius was to eschew Robert Redford (who was the original choice for the role of Benjamin Braddock) and cast a largely unknown Lilliputian, a method actor named Dustin Hoffman, for his intense “underdog quality”. Hoffman knocked the role out of the park, combining late-sixties California insouciance with a frenetic Holden Caulfield-like bipolarism, as well as genuine comedic genius that helped introduce American cinema to both the sexual revolution and a new screen icon, the anti-hero.