Money trumps art in 1930's Hollywood

THE LAST TYCOON (1976)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Elia Kazan's last film is not a full-bodied portrait of a film producer losing his way in the 1930's Hollywood. Based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's last incomplete novel, "The Last Tycoon" is a largely a series of pauses, silences and whispers in isolated room interiors - there is a claustrophobic feeling to the film even at the site of an unfinished construction of a beach house.

Monroe Stahr (Robert De Niro) is the Irving Thalberg-like movie studio chief who has a penchant for trimming and reshooting certain films to achieve something passable - he takes these projects as his personal vision, sometimes hiring and firing writers and directors at will. The movie revels in the pitch meetings and studio screenings where everyone waits to hear Monroe's word - can a film sink or swim depending on Monroe's mood that day? He does face an uphill battle - the union, the movie executives and such are concerned about ballooning budgets and last-minute revisions and reshoots. The name of the game is money and Monroe Stahr is too concerned with the writers' process and making personal statements, all of which is slowly seeping away in a New Hollywood.

Monroe is a workaholic but he does notice a lovely presence on the set one day - a young starlet in
the making perhaps named Kathleen Moore (Ingrid Boulting). She is a ravishing presence who is soft-spoken and has no phone number. Monroe is taken by her and, in some of the most romantic scenes I've seen from director Elia Kazan in ages, he tries to seduce her in that unfinished beach house. There is a certain artificiality to these scenes and that is what makes them leap from the screen - a "dream" romance that could be Monroe's imagination at work.

Written by Harold Pinter, "The Last Tycoon" is not on the same list of other monumental Kazan films but I did appreciate its understated, low-keyed qualities. De Niro also proves his worth as an elegant romantic leading man (certainly a 180 from his Travis Bickle role the same year) and it is marvelous to watch him play such an emotionally restrained character. Added to Kazan's gallery of extraordinary cast members are Robert Mitchum as an executive who sees Monroe losing his grasp of reality; Jeanne Moreau as a Joan-Crawford type (or maybe Bette Davis) actress who demands retakes; an exquisite Jack Nicholson as a union organizer; the wonderful debut of Theresa Russell as Mitchum's flirty daughter; Tony Curtis as an impotent movie star, and lastly Donald Pleasence as the drunk screenwriter who is convinced by Monroe, albeit briefly, that movies can sing when it is all about the images.

There is a profound sadness to "The Last Tycoon" and, in its own muted palette of earth tone colors, you get the impression that the excitement of making movies is withering away - it is becoming a business where personality is trumped by economics.