Elia Kazan's Elephantine 1976 Adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon is a Gorgeous Bore
It can be hard to imagine at this point, but for a long time people anticipated, rather than dreaded, the motion pictures of Robert De Niro. This was during a time when his output consisted of all-time masterpieces like The Godfather Part II and Taxi Driver instead of The Comedian and Bad Grandpa and whatever garbage he’s pumping out these days to pay the bills.
People were particularly excited to see De Niro share the screen with other titans. Just think about how jazzed people were when De Niro and Pacino finally teamed up in Heat. Then, if you really want to be depressed, remember how dispiriting it was for them to team up again during the sad, depressing bad years in Righteous Kill to remind us how far they’d fallen, separately and individually. So a big part of the appeal of 1976’s The Last Tycoon lie in the promise that De Niro would be squaring off against Jack Nicholson, albeit with De Niro in the lead and Nicholson with a very small, but very central role as a Communist who butts heads with De Niro’s scarily efficient, effective studio head.
The Last Tycoon found De Niro in his skinny, hungry prime as Monroe Stahr, a boy genius of the studio system and a wizard of principled capitalism, which the movie suggests is an oxymoron for anyone other than Stahr. On paper, at least, The Last Tycoon radiates all the promise in the world.
It was an adaptation of a famously unfinished novel F. Scott Fitzgerald had written about another towering icon doomed to die young and live forever in the hearts and minds of the public: Irving Thalberg. The Last Tycoon gave De Niro one of his juiciest roles as an unassuming genius whose brain is like an organic early computer that anticipates and solves problems before they happen.
De Niro plays the mogul as a man of ferocious focus and efficiency. He does not waste a word, a gesture or an expression. In his notes for The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald wrote that action is character, an idea central to Robert McKee’s screenwriting philosophy. Accordingly, the film’s protagonist is defined less by a mind that is fundamentally unknowable but rather by the meticulousness and care with which he conducts every facet of his life before love and anger cause him to lose control.
The Last Tycoon brought producer Sam Spiegel and director Elia Kazan together for the first time since On The Waterfront for a big-budget prestige picture that, in De Niro, brought together one of the leading lights of young Hollywood with such beloved fixtures of Hollywood’s past as Ray Milland, Dana Andrews, Robert Mitchum and Tony Curtis as some of the familiar faces in front of the cameras and behind the scenes in the bustling studio that the movie’s protagonist lords over wisely like a businessman-King.
The movie follows Stahr as he goes about his daily rounds overseeing a full slate of movies and dealing to the never-ending crises of show-business people. Stahr’s life is devoted exclusively to movies. For him, work is life and life is work, and the joy of a job well done is the greatest and truest joy anyone could ever know or strive for.
Then one day Stahr spots a mystery woman he eventually learns is Kathleen Moore (Ingrid Boulting), a sad-eyed, world-weary survivor who fascinates Stahr in no small part because she seems to be the only thing he cannot have. Even when she’s with him, she somehow manages to remain just out of his reach. Stahr fixes problems for a living so much as he makes pictures but Kathleen is a problem he cannot fix, a problem that is unfixable.
To paraphrase the old MGM slogan, The Last Tycoon has more stars than there are in heaven and while it’s a kick to see a deeply middle-aged Tony Curtis as a fading matinee idol with sexual problems or John Carradine as a big-talking studio tour guide, the second most important role in the film (after De Niro) went to Boulting, a model and ballerina who, judging by her performance here, can’t really even be deemed an actress, let alone a movie star.
Boulting’s performance here, which would be her last for four decades, can best be described as “boring” and “naked” and even the abundant nudity quickly becomes boring. When she was woefully miscast in a central role here, Boulting was primarily a ballerina and model and seems overmatched by a gig that requires her to talk and communicate and speak and not just be beautiful.
There are few commodities in Hollywood and the movie business more ubiquitous or devalued than beautiful women. Hollywood is full of beautiful women but The Last Tycoon desperately needs for Kathleen to be more than just beautiful. She has to be beautiful, of course. That is the baseline but she also needs to be mysterious and irresistible, achingly sad yet luminous all the same.
We need to believe that a man like Stahr, the widower of a huge movie star and a man who could have any woman he’d want, would be driven to obsession by his inability to have her. The film needs to convince us that she is worthy of a man like Stahr. Instead we’re doomed to wonder what he could possibly see in such a seemingly empty, vacuous blank space of a human being.
The Last Tycoon cries out for the irreverent touch of someone like Robert Altman, who specialized in riotous and humane ensemble comedy-dramas set in rich milieus like classic Hollywood. Instead we get the tasteful tedium of a past-his-prime Elia Kazan directing a Harold Pinter script whose terse, dry, minimalist dialogue further separates the movie from the white-hot emotion of Kazan’s classic work.
The Last Tycoon does not bring film history to life so much as it presents Hollywood’s distant past as something embalmed: lifeless yet preserved for posterity. The exception to the film’s tasteful tedium comes from Nicholson, whose role makes up in impact what it lacks in screen time.
Nicholson lends his blinding star power to the small but crucial role of Brimmer, a proud Communist and labor organizer from New York who comes to Los Angeles to agitate on behalf of the screenwriters who work for Stahr. Nicholson doesn’t appear until the film is firmly into its third act but his character is talked about so extensively, and his visit to Los Angeles looms so large in the film’s narrative that Brimmer is established as an important character well before he shows up onscreen.
The Last Tycoon gives Nicholson the movie star treatment in terms of hyping his character’s significance extensively through dialogue and he delivers with a movie star performance that stands out even in a movie full of movie stars, both young and hungry and old and sad.
The title character may be Jewish, but like other Jews who helped create Hollywood, his true religion is capitalism, movies and America. So Stahr sees Nicholson’s colorful Commie not just as a business foe to be vanquished, and a threat to both his livelihood and his way of life, but rather as a heretic. De Niro is never more furiously alive than when he’s trying to destroy his opponent with words without realizing that Nicholson’s lefty represents a much different, and much more formidable challenge than the man-child actors and tantrum-throwing divas he’s used to dealing with.
The Last Tycoon is an overwhelmingly cold and dry movie that really only really comes alive during De Niro and Nicholson’s epic acting skirmish. The scenes of De Niro and Nicholson in combat represent an explosion of energy and conflict and excitement that, alas, arrives much too late to redeem this lumbering, underwhelming mediocrity.
De Niro and Nicholson’s scenes have endured because they featured two young lions of New Hollywood squaring off against each other in their primes but they also, alas, stand out because they’re just about the only element of this bloated, inert dinosaur that isn’t a raging disappointment.
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