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6.3/10   2,811 votes
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View company contact information for The Last Tycoon on IMDbPro.
Release Date:
19 November 1976 (USA) more
Genre:
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. | add synopsis
Awards:
Nominated for Oscar. Another 1 win more
NewsDesk:
Writer Harold Pinter Dead At 78
 (From Studio Briefing - Film News. 26 December 2008, 1:33 AM, PST)

User Reviews:
Disjointed, uneven, and strangely memorable more (33 total)

Cast

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Additional Details

Runtime:
123 min
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Color:
Black and White | Color (Technicolor)
Aspect Ratio:
1.85 : 1 more
Sound Mix:

Fun Stuff

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. more
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.
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Movie Connections:
References San Francisco (1936) more

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13 out of 15 people found the following review useful.
Disjointed, uneven, and strangely memorable, 29 January 2004
7/10
Author: macsperkins from 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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De Niro and Nicholson--Only Film Together? chuckfrench
The Review on the Front Page awfootball34
Any1 think Deniro looks like Jeff Probst(survivor host) in this movie? sloanrules
The ending (might contain spoilers) cil_b
a very underrated film karl-bourseguin
This movie is weak swinginparis
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