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The Last Tycoon (1976)

Posted By: Efgrapha

Date: 30 Jul 2014 12:19:50

Elia Kazan directed this curiously constipated film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished final novel, about Monroe Starr, a brilliant and efficient studio executive (based upon Fitzgerald's experiences with MGM wunderkind Irving Thalberg). Robert De Niro plays Monroe Starr in a cool and detached manner, and as Kazan pans around the Hollywood Dream Factory of the 1930s, Starr juggles several productions, deals with nervous actors and recalcitrant directors, stays afloat in the Hollywood corporate battlefields, and secretly carries on a love affair with an even cooler and more detached English girl, Kathleen Moore (Ingrid Boulting).

Synopsis by Paul Brenner, Allmovie.com

"Not half a dozen men have been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads," says the narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Last Tycoon."

For a brief period in the late 20's and 30's, Irving Thalberg could. Thalberg, the production chief at M-G-M, a "boy genius" until his death at the age of 37 in 1936, appeared to be able to divine successful films as mysteriously as other people found water with a forked stick of witch hazel.

The equation he held in his head told him how much a certain kind of picture would gross, which, in turn, told him how much could be profitably spent on its production. He knew whose brains to rent. The capacities of directors, writers and actors were as apparent to him as labeled contents. He could cut four minutes from a dreary 100-minute movie in such a way to make it seem a single, breathless experience of 60 minutes. In those days, movies—pictures—didn't waste time getting to points.

Thalberg was responsible for good films and bad. Though his genius was made possible by the period, when Hollywood and its public were one, he was regarded with awe, as if he possessed not simply a knack for pictures but the secret of life.

All of these things are contained in the muted and thoughtful, sad but unsentimental film version of "The Last Tycoon" about Fitzgerald's Thalberg-like hero named Monroe Stahr. Written by Harold Pinter, and directed by Elia Kazan, the movie attempts to take Hollywood seriously, without hoopla and grotesqueries, and especially to take Thalberg-Stahr seriously.

Fitzgerald didn't live to finish "The Last Tycoon," so that the version published in 1941, edited by Edmund Wilson with Fitzgerald's notes, is technically a fragment, yet it's a very complete satisfying fragment, a quality that the film preserves through an abrupt kind of editing style and a narrative that's without conventional shape.

Thalberg died before being overtaken by defeat. In the film, Monroe Stahr does not. Stahr, who is played with reticent passion by Robert De Niro, whose lean, dark good looks seem an idealization of Thalberg's, becomes a casualty of the "new" Hollywood of Wall Street investors, bankers and union organizers that Fitzgerald could see in the future.

"The Last Tycoon," which opened yesterday at the Cinema I, is a very low-key movie, and so full of associations—to Thalberg, to the stories one knows of Hollywood in the 30's, to Fitzgerald's own life and career—that it's difficult to differentiate between what one is seeing on the screen and what one is bringing to it.

"The Last Tycoon" doesn't really build to any climax. We follow it horizontally, as if it were a landscape being surveyed by a camera in a long pan-shot. The background is Hollywood in the Golden Thirties, when studios turned out 30 to 40 pictures a year and every backlot could simultaneously contain pictures set in New York, Africa, the South Pole and Montmartre.

In the foreground are scenes from the curious life of Monroe Stahr as he edits several films at once, deals with neurotic actors and directors, maneuvers in corporate battles, and carries on an affair with a mysterious English girl whom he loves and loses.

In one of his final notes for "The Last Tycoon," Fitzgerald wrote in capital letters, "Action Is Character." It is one of the achievements of Messrs. Kazan, Pinter and De Niro that so much of Monroe Stahr succeeds in coming through in the film. Other characters that are so vivid in the book simply don't have enough time on screen, though both Robert Mitchum—as Stahr's studio adversary—and Jack Nicholson—as the union organizer—are extremely effective. Jeanne Moreau and Tony Curtis make brief, flashy appearances as idols of the old-time silver screen.

Ingrid Boulting, who plays Stahr's mysterious English love, is beautiful in an eccentrically large-eyed way, and there are times when she doesn't seem to know how to read a line or where to put her hands. At other moments she is totally, serenely sure of herself, which may or may not be acting but does suggest the odd quality that drew Stahr to her. I also liked another new actress, Theresa Russell, who plays the Hollywood-born, Bennington-educated girl who narrates the novel but is simply a supporting character in the film.

None of the changes that Mr. Pinter has made in the novel seem to me to damage the style or mood of the book. More than any other screen adaptation of a Fitzgerald work—with the exception of Joan Micklin Silver's fine adaptation of the short story "Bernice Bobs Her Hair"—"The Last Tycoon" preserves original feeling and intelligence. The movie is full of echoes. We watch it as if at a far remove from what's happening, but that too is appropriate: Fitzgerald was writing history as it happened.

Review by Vincent Canby, New York Times

IMDB 6,4/10 from 5 196 users
Wiki

Director: Elia Kazan

Writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald (novel), Harold Pinter (screenplay)

Cast: Robert De Niro, Tony Curtis, Robert Mitchum, Jeanne Moreau, Jack Nicholson, Donald Pleasence, Ingrid Boulting and other