The Last Tycoon (1976)

Director:

Elia Kazan

Writers:

F. Scott Fitzgerald (novel)
Harold Pinter (writer)

Release Date:

19 November 1976 (USA)

Genre:

Drama | Romance

Tagline:

He has the power to make anyone's dream come true... except his own.

Plot:

F.Scott Fitzgerald's novel is brought to life in this story of a movie producer slowly working himself to death. |

Plot Keywords:

Beach House | Hollywood | Telegram | Melodrama | Premarital Sex

Awards:

Nominated for Oscar. Another 1 win

Cast

  (Cast overview, first billed only)

Robert De Niro	...	Monroe Stahr
Tony Curtis	...	Rodriguez
Robert Mitchum	...	Pat Brady
Jeanne Moreau	...	Didi
Jack Nicholson	...	Brimmer
Donald Pleasence	...	Boxley
Ray Milland	...	Fleishacker
Dana Andrews	...	Red Ridingwood
Ingrid Boulting	...	Kathleen Moore
Peter Strauss	...	Wylie
Theresa Russell	...	Cecilia Brady
Tige Andrews	...	Popolos
Morgan Farley	...	Marcus
John Carradine	...	Tour guide
Jeff Corey	...	Doctor

Runtime:

123 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White | Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Iceland:L | Australia:M | Netherlands:6 | Sweden:11 | USA:PG (certificate #24458) | Argentina:16 | Finland:K-16 | UK:15

Company:

Academy Pictures Corporation

Trivia:

Producer Sam Spiegel considered Elia Kazan, who directed On the Waterfront (1954) (which won Spiegel his first of three Best Picture Oscars), one of his closest friends. He chose Kazan, who was virtually retired, to direct The Last Tycoon (1976). According to Spiegel biographer Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni, Spiegel had a father-son relationship with "Tycoon" screenwriter Harold Pinter, the great playwright. Spiegel was quite taken with Pinter's genius, so much so it hurt the film adaptation of The Last Tycoon (1976), wrote "Tycoon" director Kazan in his own autobiography, as Spiegel treated the screenplay as sacrosanct and wouldn't let Kazan change it to create more dramatic tension. Ironically, when Spiegel had first seen a screenplay written by Pinter in the 1960s (The Servant (1963), he had been appalled by its lack of professionalism.

Quotes:

Cecilia Brady: [about returning to school] Oh, I don't know. I'm pretty well educated.
[flirtatiously]
Cecilia Brady: Maybe I should get married.
Monroe Stahr: [lightly] Well, I'd marry you, I'm lonely, but I'm too old and tired to undertake anything.
Cecilia Brady: [seriously] Undertake me.

Movie Connections:

References San Francisco (1936)

Disjointed, uneven, and strangely memorable

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.