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The Last Tycoon (1976)

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20 out of 21 people found the following comment useful :-
One of the Most Overlooked Films in History For Good and For Bad..., 24 junio 1999

Author: Donald J. Lamb de Philadelphia, PA

What a mystery THE LAST TYCOON has been. This is a large-scale film with perhaps the greatest cast of male actors in history and nary a mention is made of it. Most critics bash it, the common viewer may dismiss it, but you cannot deny its place in history. It is not often you will find such a pool of talent AND a movie with both Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson on screen together. They even FIGHT! By the way, THE LAST TYCOON also happens to be an excellent, if flawed, work of art.

Director Elia Kazan (GENTLEMEN'S AGREEMENT, ON THE WATERFRONT) and company have taken F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel about the politics and personal conflicts of 1930's Hollywood and put forth an off-beat, unusual picture. Kazan is one of only three directors to successfully direct motion pictures between the 1940's on through the 1970's (the other 2 being Hitchcock and Huston). A staggeringly legendary cast play their parts effectively instead of just calling in their performances, which easily could have happened. Perhaps there was some competition between the old school actors and their methods (Mitchum, Milland, Andrews, Curtis, Pleasence to name a few) and the "method" actors like De Niro or Nicholson who symbolically take the torch in this film. This is especially true of De Niro's extraordinary lead as "Monroe Stahr" (based on Irving Thalberg). Kazan helped to create the "method" acting concept, so who better to direct such a crossroad of talent.

"Monroe Stahr" is a no nonsense "Studio Chief" who I'm sure Fitzgerald encountered while a hack writer in Hollywood during his final years. De Niro as "Stahr" orders cuts here and fires directors there and caters to what he thinks audiences want. He is actually a noble character, something Fitzgerald may not have meant to express. He must deal with Robert Mitchum and Ray Milland, who represent the corporate, artless side of the picture business and later the writer's wing (represented by Mr. Nicholson). As expected, there are many conflicts of interest but the movie's magic lies in the amazing contrast Kazan and company make between the dream world of an old black and white movie and what happened when the director yelled "CUT".

I love classic black and white films and one of the aspects that made them so great was the world you were thrust into. Fake backdrops, miniatures, and grand sets surrounded the actors in most of them, but the dream-like quality of a black and white film kept you involved. With this film, some curiously familiar "fictional" film clips are used for screening purposes where the studio executives would clap or claw at what was projected (They were filmed specifically for this film). Kazan and co. create scenes from supposed films (one was CASABLANCA turned inside out) to add some realism to it all. We get to see an actor from the movies-within-the-movie "on" and "off-screen". Tony Curtis has some good early scenes as a perfect screen presence, but an awfully inept star "off-screen" when he meets with De Niro to confess his sexual confusion in real life. You'll know what I mean if you see the flick for yourself.

LAST TYCOON is a love story more than anything. Many people may dismiss the love angle as a distraction. I found it slightly hypnotic and mysterious. The love interest, played by a beautiful actress named Ingrid Boulting, is great at exuding an elusive quality, something the De Niro character can't put his finger on. It all leads up to a somewhat vague climax and ending, but perhaps the filmmakers were unable to come up with the final stamp Fitzgerald failed to accomplish himself.

This is a film for discerning and patient film-goers only. It is unlike anything I have ever seen before. That is why I see movies. Why the film has been so looked over is bizarre. Even if you consider it a complete flop, it deserves recognition, if only for the great cast. If you like classic films and know a thing or two about film history, you may know why THE LAST TYCOON is so captivating.

RATING: 8 1/2 of 10

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18 out of 19 people found the following comment useful :-
A tour-de-force performance by De Niro, 18 enero 2003

Author: Moon_shot de Newport, Maine

Robert De Niro arguably gave the most critically acclaimed performances during the 1970's in movies like "Mean Streets", "Bang the Drum Slowly", "The Godfather, Part II", "Taxi Driver, "The Deer Hunter", etc.,. Little has been said, however, about his turn as Monroe Stahr in "The Last Tycoon" - quite possibly De Niro's most underrated and most uncharacteristic performance on screen. "The Last Tycoon", itself, was a mixed bag among the critics. Some liked it. Some didn't. In my view, "The Last Tycoon" was a movie that deserves a place in film history for exploring Hollywood in the inside. This movie, however, provides only a small glimpse into this which was why the critics were divided. Shortly put, "The Last Tycoon" deals with a top producer's (De Niro) everyday life and the conflict that arises when he sees a lost loved one - albeit in a different way.

The movie boasts of several big names of the past as well as the present. Robert Mitchum, Jeanne Moreau, Anjelica Huston (in a cameo), Tony Curtis, John Carradine, etc., were few of the key players. Jack Nicholson makes a late appearance in the film providing for some brilliant, electric scenes with De Niro. In fact their scenes together (undoubtedly the highlight of the movie) make the one scene that De Niro and Al Pacino shared in Michael Mann's "Heat" seem pedestrian. De Niro and Nicholson, two of the greatest actors American film has even seen, will most likely never work together again considering their stature today which makes their scenes together in "The Last Tycoon" that much more priceless. Ingrid Boutling, a British model, is cast opposite De Niro and gives a wooden performance. She is the only weak link of the picture. A young Theresa Russell also gives an able supporting performance. Ultimately, however, "The Last Tycoon" lies solely on De Niro's shoulders and he makes full use of the opportunity and then some. De Niro's interpretation of a movie mogul (reportedly based on Irving G. Thalberg) is absolutely genuine and original. Looking trim and handsome, De Niro gives a towering, commanding performance as Monroe Stahr and it is his work here that holds the picture together. Though the critics were split down the middle in their opinion regarding this film, there was one thing they agreed upon. Robert De Niro gives an authentic, striking performance in the central role. In my opinion, a performance which deserved an Oscar nomination.

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13 out of 14 people found the following comment useful :-
Misunderstood masterpiece, 11 agosto 2001

Author: pdoniger de Connecticut, USA

De Niro was an unexpected surprise as Monroe Starr in this brilliant adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished last novel. He gives a thoughtful, sensitive, and intelligent performance as this character, who was modeled on MGM producer, Irving Thalberg. Fitzgerald wrote about Hollywood from the inside, and from the perspective of someone who was destroying himself by being inside. He could ask for nothing better than to have English playwright Harold Pinter create this stark, human screenplay and then have Elia Kazan realize it.

In addition to De Niro's definitive performance, we get a series of perfect cameos (usually an impossibility) from Tony Curtis, Jeanne Moreau, Robert Mitchum, and others. We also get two screen debuts of merit -- Angelica Huston (in a small, but memorable scene) and an excellent Teresa Russell as Starr's would-be sweetheart. The critics hated the movie, and it did poorly in box offices, but it was truly, like Fitzgerald himself, an American masterpiece.

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10 out of 12 people found the following comment useful :-
Disjointed, uneven, and strangely memorable, 29 enero 2004

Author: macsperkins de Houston, Texas

Kazan and Pinter's THE LAST TYCOON is disjointed, uneven, and strangely memorable -- rather like an oddly unsettling, hazily recalled dream.

Robert De Niro, in a quietly amazing performance, disappears into the title character of Monroe Stahr, a workaholic Hollywood producer who is, in Keats's phrase, "half in love with easeful death." (This understated movie is from the same year as De Niro's flashy bravura turn in Martin Scorsese's TAXI DRIVER.)

Most of the supporting cast is excellent, including Robert Mitchum and Ray Milland as a couple of Shakespearean-knavish villains, Jack Nicholson, Donald Pleasence, Theresa Russell, and Dana Andrews.

Ingrid Boulting is beautiful but somewhat less satisfactory as Stahr's love interest, Kathleen Moore. In fairness, however, her role is deliberately written as something of an enigma: Kathleen Moore is a blank movie screen onto which Stahr, a near-solipsist, projects fantasies and memories of his deceased wife.

The various elements of THE LAST TYCOON never quite cohere into a whole, but several scenes have stuck in my memory ever since I first saw it years ago. Among them:

- Stahr's mock-lecture to the misfit screenwriter Boxley (Donald Pleasence), beginning: "You've been fighting duels all day..."

- Kathleen Moore telling Stahr, over the insistent crash of the surf at his unfinished ocean-front mansion, "I want ... a quiet life"

- Stahr's informal evening meeting with a labor-union organizer (Jack Nicholson), during which the privately despondent movie producer grows increasingly drunk and belligerent; and ...

- The closing ten minutes or so of the film, which take on an almost surreal quality: Disembodied lines of dialogue from earlier scenes recur; Stahr repeats his earlier speech to Boxley, only now as a soliloquy addressed directly to the camera; and then -- murmuring "I don't want to lose you" -- he seems to hallucinate a vision of Kathleen as she moves on to a new life without him.

Only Jeanne Moreau and Tony Curtis struck me as jarringly miscast in their parts. They -- and their comic-pathetic scenes as insecure movie idols -- seemed to belong to another movie entirely.

THE LAST TYCOON is an uneven work but most assuredly has its merits.

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11 out of 15 people found the following comment useful :-
Fitzgerald's romance turned arctic, 19 marzo 1999
Author: matthew wilder (picqueur@aol.com) de los angeles

Fitzgerald's unfinished novel about the romantic yearnings of an Irving Thalberg-like mogul (Robert DeNiro) is turned into the screenwriter Harold Pinter's stock in trade: a sphinxlike ballet of omitted information. The mixture of Pinter's ellipsis-strewn dialogue rhythms and the coarseness of the Old Hollywood setting gives the picture a strange, detached mood--cryptic, teasing, vaguely dislikable. DeNiro would nail this sewed-up-kingpin character two decades later in Scorsese's CASINO; here, whether through youthful inexperience or Pinter's deletions, he's remote and untantalizing. The punch of Fitzgerald's story--the hyperefficient chief's destruction through a search for the love he never found--never lands, because Pinter has drawn the character as a pinched, uncommunicative stick who seems to have no inner life. (It doesn't help that the director, Elia Kazan, seems unsure if he wants to communicate that DeNiro's love interest, Ingrid Boulting, is either a vapid lump or a pornographic doll.) Pinter designs most of the scenes to have anti-payoffs; in one--DeNiro's counsel to a panicky, impotent movie star (Tony Curtis)--he seems to have carefully tailored a joke with no punchline. With Theresa Russell, who gives the best performance as the Big Boss' daughter, and Jack Nicholson, in one of his finest tiny-role performances as a strangely fastidious union organizer. Also with Robert Mitchum, Ray Milland, Donald Pleasence, Seymour Cassel, Jeff Corey, and an extremely young, haunted-looking Anjelica Huston.

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6 out of 9 people found the following comment useful :-
worth watching for Theresa Russell alone., 16 agosto 2000
Author: keitheuk de Windsor ,England

This movie is worth watching for Theresa Russell alone.Ok the rest of the cast are all very good but a heart rending role from Theresa Russell steals the film,you can see her mind working and her face is a picture in every sense.At the start of her career to be in a scene with De niro and Nicholson and walk away with it,is something worth watching.A very moving and affecting work by an actress in a worthwhile film.

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7 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
DULL and BORING...see it for De Niro and Nicholson, 8 noviembre 2006
Author: SeanJoyce de United States

I recently purchased The Last Tycoon for $6.03 at an online site. I wondered how a film loaded with stars of such high caliber, with Eliza Kazan at the helm (his last film), and its foundation being an (unfinished) F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, could go so unrecognized by film fans.

I heard from several sources that it was rather dull and flat. I didn't care...the main reason I purchased it was to see Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson share their only scene(s) to date together. I figured the price was worth it.

And certainly, it really wasn't a good movie. Lavish production and decent performances, but there was no energy and seemingly no story. It just crawled along at its sloooow, interminable pace. It's not that terrible a movie, just not an interesting one, and certainly not one that I can ever see myself revisiting.

Stahr is a powerful movie producer. We see, through several meetings with other higher-ups and the attendance of movie screenings, that he has a pretty good stranglehold on studio affairs. The real "narrative" comes from the romance he repeatedly tries to maintain with a young girl he meets at a party. Stahr (De Niro) attends a screening of a film and makes amends. Stahr gets together with the girl. All is well. Stahr receives bad news from her. They reunite. Stahr attends another screening. They break up again. And that's really all it is.

HOWEVER, and this is really where all my concern lay, it was awesome seeing legendary contemporaries De Niro and Nicholson work together. We get roughly 10 minutes of good heated, confrontational footage between the two that results in a drunken explosion, so to say. I'll definitely re-watch this part of the movie, so I'd say the $6.03 was worth it. So see it for De Niro and Nicholson, if only.

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5 out of 8 people found the following comment useful :-
I didn't read the book, 18 agosto 1999

Author: Cacciato de Baltimore, MD

The few comments I've read here about the movie seem to refer quite a bit to Fitzgerald's book. I happen to believe that a movie should be judged on its own merits. The Last Tycoon, then, is probably one of those many movies that pales in comparison to the book. Nonetheless, this movie is an excellent work. De Niro is excellent as Monroe Stahr, the reclusive studio head who concerns himself more with the quality of a film rather than the revenue it would generate, an aspect that ultimately leads to his demise. Movies are a passion of his, soon superseded by an interest in a woman (Moore) who reminds him of a lost love. Ultimately, Stahr loses everything, his career and Moore, shattering his dreams of happiness with a disheartening realism.

This is the only Kazan movie I've ever seen, breaking a vow that I would never see one of his films after learning about his aggressively anti-communist (anti-freedom) history. Kazan does a wonderful job of directing, however, helped not in the least by an extremely talented cast (particularly noteworthy is De Niro's performance in his early Taxi Driver Raging Bull acting days). The woman who plays Moore could've done a better job, having this elusive, ethereal beauty at some points in the film, then an annoying vapidness in other parts. The movie portrays love and ambition in a humanizing light, without the gut wrenching sentimentality of many movies of this genre. Particularly wonderful was Stahr's acting of a certain scene twice (one to motivate a screenwriter named Boxley, and the other in the end of the film, a desperate coming to terms of a love lost twice). Also beautiful was the role movies played in Stahr's life; in one sense he vicariously experiences love in the films (and loses his love in the above-mentioned scene he acts out), and in another sense, movies mark the rise and fall of his power, as he fades into a dark, empty movie lot in the end.

Wonderful film... don't read the book, it'll only ruin it.

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1 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :-
veers towards being TOO subtle and stuffy, but remains a good view into coldness of 1930s Hollywood, 20 marzo 2008

Author: Filmjack3 de United States

For a little while as I watched the Last Tycoon, I thought I could understand what the critics said of this film when it first came out (the majority of them I mean). The screenplay, written by Harold Pinter from what is supposedly a much richer (albeit incomplete) text from F. Scott Fitzgerald, stages many scenes like how one would see on a theater stage, with only one or two little directional differences with Elia Kazan's take on the material. This, plus its slightly 'dry' style (i.e. very little musical score, limited camera movement, performances kept without much, if at all, improvisation), makes things seem almost too much in the realm of the naturalistic, of drama kept to a minimum of interaction.

But as the film went along like this, I started to notice something: the sort of coldness, almost a loneliness, with the character of Monroe Stahr, is what actually makes a lot of the movie work for all its intents and purposes. It has the veneer of being a little distanced, of not having the full driving force of drama and comedy (although it does have both of those in bits and pieces, more as little familial or romantic drama or one-line throwaways) like an 8 1/2 or the Player with dealing in the problems of a professional in the film industry. But because of Stahr's method of practices, of being as Mitchum's character describes "like a priest or a rabbi, 'this is how it will be'", when he's told 'no' it shatters him. As a film about loss, and the very calculated realization that his code in business spills over into the personal, the Last Tycoon does work.

Maybe not very well, but work it does, as storytelling and as a character piece. Sure, it might not be De Niro's best, but he does deliver subtle like it's as second nature as breathing (kind of a twist on his other 1976 character, Travis Bickle, whom he played subtle but also crazy, where as here it's subtle and empty), and he's got plenty of backup. There was some critical flack for the actress Ingrid Boutling, playing the nearly obscure object of Monroe's desire-cum-demand, but she too is better than she was given credit for, at least within the range she's allowed to work in (which, granted, isn't as much as one might think, but she's seen not as a fully-fleshed person but as someone with hints of a reality she needs and a fantasy world of movies she doesn't).

Then there's Nicholson, showing up in the final reels for a couple of amazing scenes sparring with De Niro, barely ever raising voices for a low-key one-on-one as a movie exec and communist writer organizer. Not to forget Mitchum, in maybe his last good performance, and Theresa Russell in also an underrated turn as a woman grown up way past her years. Did I mention Jeanne Moreau? She's Moreau, that's about it, playing a completely self-absorbed star for all its one dimension is worth. Only Tony Curtis, with his libido problems isn't par for the course, and Donald Pleasance has a shaky (if darkly funny) scene as a scorned writer.

Does the Last Tycoon have some problems as feeling like compelling historical drama? Sure. But does it somehow get into the atmosphere of its character in the context of his profession, revealing all that's absent for him every day coming home to his Asian butler? Absolutely. It's a mix and match that will disappoint some, and for those who want to take the chance on a somewhat forgotten 70s film- Kazan's last and Spiegel's final ego-tickler- might be even more impressed than I was. 7.5/10

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2 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Mix of stars past and present, 14 mayo 2007

Author: LDRose de United Kingdom

The Last Tycoon revolves around a 1930s movie mogul Monroe Stahr (Robert De Niro) and gives an insight into the studio system of the time. De Niro gives a subtle and sensitive performance as Stahr who becomes distracted following a chance sighting which reminds him of a love from his past. The ensuing budding romance is accompanied by a haunting Maurice Jarre score and beautiful cinematography. At times, though, this part of the film feels drawn out and not enough time is given to the star-studded supporting cast - especially Jack Nicholson, who has great scenes at the end of the film with De Niro. There are plenty of familiar faces, including Robert Mitchum, Tony Curtis, Ray Milland, Dana Andrews and Anjelica Huston, who mainly appear in cameo roles. The film as a whole is richly detailed and absorbing and is a compelling portrait of Stahr's work and love - a love invoked from the past that gradually unravels his grip on the present.

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