"Top-notch stars and top-notch production give this movie a first-class quality."

Beloved Infidel - The Big Picture
Needing money to support his wife in an asylum and his daughter in a private school, a despondent F. Scott Fitzgerald (Gregory Peck) attempts to sell screenplays and redeem a failing literary career in the Hollywood of the late 1930s. He meets an ambitious young English writer named Sheilah Graham (Deborah Kerr) and takes her under his wing. Their affair marks both the high and low points of what turns out to be the last year of the great writer's life.

Plot Thickeners
The aristocratic and demure Graham falls in love with Fitzgerald the night after they meet at a Hollywood party. After she discovers Fitzgerald's true situation from a mutual friend (Eddie Albert), she can no longer stand fooling the one man she's ever loved; she tells him her real name, that she has no rich and beautiful family, but grew up in an orphanage, longing to be accepted and loved. In his despondency, Fitzgerald finds in Graham a kind of salvation. But when he discovers she is not the blueblood she claims to be, he cruelly degrades her, and interferes in her career. Meanwhile, Fitzgerald's studio bosses feel that he is not making any progress on his fourth screenplay, and they fire him. Fitzgerald then hits the bottle before his lover can intervene.

Graham eventually gets a house for him in Malibu where he can write. One day, she finds him drunkenly giving away all of his clothes to a couple of bums. When she reprimands him, he taunts her again, and threatens to kill her. Enraged and disgusted at his behavior, she leaves him. Fitzgerald finally comes to his senses and gets her back, and proceeds to finish six chapters of his book and even gets an advance from his publishers. Then, a few days before Christmas, just as things are beginning to brighten for him, he begins to tell her about his new book. But before he can finish, he collapses to the floor and dies. Graham is left alone with only his beautifully phrased words of love and devotion.

Notes and Quotes
This film is based on the book by Sheilah Graham and Gerold Frank, and is much more Graham's story than Fitzgerald's. Although he was sober at the time of his death, Fitzgerald was plagued by years of guzzling cheap gin; he died from a massive heart attack in Graham's company while reading a Princeton alumni magazine, chewing on a Hershey bar, and sipping a Coke. In a sad end to the tale of this tragic giant, the writer Dorothy Parker was the only one of his friends to go to his funeral.

For Trivia Experts Only
The elegant cars in the film include a 1935 16-cylinder Cadillac town car once owned by Twentieth Century-Fox producer Darryl F. Zanuck. It is driven in the film by actor Herbert Rudley, who plays the Zanuck-like producer. Composer-conductor Franz Waxman, who co- wrote the original music score for the movie, was a close friend of Fitzgerald's. In a similar vein, Eddie Albert's character is based on the comedic actor Robert Benchley, who was a close friend of Albert's in the thirties.