| The Last Tycoon | |
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film poster by Richard Amsel |
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| Directed by | Elia Kazan |
| Produced by | Sam Spiegel |
| Written by | Harold Pinter |
| Story by | F. Scott Fitzgerald (Novel) |
| Starring | Robert De Niro Tony Curtis Robert Mitchum Jack Nicholson Donald Pleasence Jeanne Moreau |
| Music by | Maurice Jarre |
| Cinematography | Victor J. Kemper |
| Editing by | Richard Marks |
| Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
| Release date(s) | August 26, 1976 |
| Running time | 123 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
The Last Tycoon is a 1976 American dramatic film directed by Elia Kazan and produced by Sam Spiegel, based upon Harold Pinter's screenplay adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, sometimes known as The Love of the Last Tycoon. It stars Robert De Niro, Tony Curtis, Robert Mitchum, Jack Nicholson, Donald Pleasence, Jeanne Moreau and Theresa Russell. The film was the second collaboration between Kazan and Spiegel, who worked closely together to make On the Waterfront. Fitzgerald based the novel's protagonist, Monroe Stahr, on film producer Irving Thalberg. Spiegel was once awarded the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award.
The film did not receive the critical acclaim that much of Kazan's earlier work received, but it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Art Direction (Gene Callahan, Jack T. Collis, Jerry Wunderlich).[1]
Coincidentally, it was Fitzgerald's last, unfinished novel, as well as the last film Kazan directed. An important symbolic aspect of the story (related to the first fact) is the unfinished beach house of the protagonist, which he visits to impress the woman with whom he has fallen in love.
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Monroe Stahr (De Niro) is the young production chief and the most important executive of one of the biggest studios of the Golden Age of Hollywood. An unstoppable worker in a time of turmoil in the industry due to the creation of the Writers Guild of America, his life flows between shootings, industry bosses' machinations, discussions with scriptwriters and actors, a battle with the union organizer and an infatuation for a young woman with a troubled past, who is engaged to be married with another man, and for whom he develops true love. As his difficulties grow bigger and his health decreases, his life runs to an uncertain but inevitable twilight that echoes a long gone era.
Author Francis Scott Fitzgerald did not 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. Nevertheless, it's a very complete satisfying fragment; a quality that the film preserves through an abrupt kind of editing style and a narrative that flows without conventional shape.
In one of his final notes for The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald wrote in capital letters: "Action Is Character". The same objective Kazan, Pinter and De Niro reached out for, to be able to transfer much of Monroe Stahr to the film. Jeanne Moreau and Tony Curtis make brief appearances as idols of the old times silver screen.
The Last Tycoon's protagonist, Monroe Stahr, is a character full of associations to Irving Thalberg, the production chief at M-G-M in the period between the late 20's and 30's. The background is Hollywood in the Golden Thirties, when studios made 30 to 40 productions a year and every backlot could simultaneously contain pictures set in places such as New York, Africa, the South Pole and Montmartre. The background of the film has a close bond to stories of Hollywood at that time, as well as to Fitzgerald's own life and career. Thalberg, a "boy genius" until his death at the age of 37 in 1936, was held in high regard inside and outside Hollywood, as he appeared to be able to divine successful films continuously; knowing in his head how much a certain kind of picture would gross, which, in turn, told him how much could be profitably to spent on its production. Monroe Stahr, who is played with reticent passion by Robert De Niro (whose lean, dark good looks seem an idealization of Thalberg's), has the same uncanny ability, but eventually becomes a casualty of the "new" Hollywood of Wall Street investors, bankers and union organizers that Fitzgerald could see in the future. Thalberg died before being overtaken by defeat, while in the film, Stahr does not.[2]
The theme of unfinished ambitions and the unattained love of the young and beautiful in Hollywood, embodied by the beach house, have great significance for both the Novelist and Director at the end of their luminary careers.
| “ | 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.[3] | ” |
The critical reaction to The Last Tycoon has been mixed; it received positive reviews from 44% of critics cited by Rotten Tomatoes.[4]
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