Le dernier nabab

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.

This movie is interesting only for film nerds, I think. On paper, it looks great: you have one of the most influential directors of his time with Elia Kazan. It stars a young Robert De Niro who had a string of successful and critical acclaimed movies (Mean Streets, Godfather II, Taxi Driver, all made between 1973 and 1976) But not just De Niro was a big name; Robert Mitchum, Dana Andrews, Donald Pleasence, Tony Curtis, Anjelica Huston. And of course, Jack Nicholson won the Oscar a year before; in 1976 with "One flew over the cuckoo's nest" What could go wrong?

Almost everything, as it turns out.

The "story" sounds intriguing about a young movie producer Monroe Stahr (De Niro), working successfully in Hollywood in the 1930s. You do get a glimpse of how much power the studio bosses had in that time, just before significant changes happened with unions and writer guilds.

The film could go in so many directions: showing the shadow side of Tinseltown, maybe even a satire. Instead, what we've got is a dry, empty, uninteresting film that feels like an eternity.

Especially the romantic scenes involving Monroe Stahr and Katleen Moore are among the dullest performances I have seen for a long time. Especially actress Ingrid Boulting who plays Kathleen Moore had me almost in a coma. Boulting, a model turned actress, has nothing to add except a pretty face. It's not entirely her fault; it's also a very weak screenplay with dialogue that made me cringe. No idea what Kazan was thinking.

Only one highlight this film has to offer: Jack Nicholson's character Brimmer was quite good, but he came too late into the film. Still, nice to see De Niro and Nicholson in a few scenes together.

Finally, what I can say is that this movie is a trap. It looks good with all the talent who is involved in this film, but there is nothing inside, only for hardcore fans of Kazan or a particular actor.

It should be shown in film school as an example that great actors never automatically make a great film.

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.

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.

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