Elia Kazan (1976)
At the time of his sudden death in December 1940, F Scott Fitzgerald had already exceeded the wordage he originally had in mind for The Last Tycoon but the novel was far from finished. The manuscript stops during the sixth chapter; Fitzgerald left behind plenty of notes on the story to follow, the principal characters, and so on. The novel, including these notes, was first published in 1941, with a foreword by Edmund Wilson, who had done some minor editing of the manuscript and collected the notes. It’s not clear how the plot strands outlined by Fitzgerald might have fitted together or what the final form of narration would have been. As it stands, The Last Tycoon alternates somewhat awkwardly between third-person and first-person narrative. The latter voice is that of Cecilia Brady, the college student daughter of a Hollywood producer. At one point, she has to explain that ‘This is Celia [sic] taking up the narrative in person’. She introduces a key part of the description of Monroe Stahr, Cecilia’s father’s producing partner and the novel’s main character, as follows:
‘… I have determined to give you a glimpse of him functioning, which is my excuse for what follows. It is drawn partly from a paper I wrote in college on A Producer’s Day and partly from my imagination.’
The convolutions of the storytelling actually add to the interest of reading the novel. Cecilia is a character complex enough to make you wonder, for example, how much of the third-person narrative is shaped by her perspective even when she doesn’t acknowledge it. Elia Kazan’s film of The Last Tycoon, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter, could hardly be more different. It doesn’t only eschew voiceover narration. It lacks an authorial voice and narrative momentum of any kind.
Cecilia’s ‘A Producer’s Day’ conveys Monroe Stahr’s colossal and wide-ranging workload, how remarkably and completely in charge of everything he seems to be. When Stahr suddenly becomes obsessed with a young woman whom he’s seen by chance and fleetingly, his attempts to find her again are, at first, one more assignment undertaken during long office hours. When he meets the young woman, Kathleen Moore, and pursues a relationship with her, the reader realises the magnitude of this disturbance to his usual life. He first catches sight of her in the immediate aftermath to a minor earthquake in Hollywood – symbolically predictive, except that Kathleen’s world-shaking effect is much higher on the Richter scale. Yet Stahr, even when preoccupied with her, keeps going tirelessly at the studios. There’s nothing of this in the film. Kazan seems so intent on rubbishing 1930s Hollywood that the place isn’t even a hive of crazy, corrupt activity, let alone artistic endeavour. Stahr is less a creative workaholic, destroying what remains of his physical health, than the leading man in a more conventional drama, searching for love and happiness. Kazan devotes a large part of The Last Tycoon to Stahr’s short-lived affair with Kathleen. The director, like his protagonist, has a surprising amount of time on his hands.
Supposedly based on the ‘boy wonder’ Irving Thalberg (who died in 1936, barely older than the century), Fitzgerald’s Monroe Stahr is the exemplar of a dying breed of Hollywood executive. Producers like Stahr, combining first-rate business sense with artistic insight, are hopelessly outnumbered by the heartless philistine moneymen of the industry, represented by Pat Brady. Perhaps Fitzgerald’s conception was Stahry-eyed but it seems futile to adapt his novel without respecting its point of view more than Kazan and Pinter do. The meaning of the title itself is opaque until the last few minutes (pretty well the only part of the film that takes the plot beyond where Fitzgerald’s manuscript breaks off), when Brady and other studio board members move to oust Stahr. Even then, it’s not obvious quite how he’s the end of a line because there haven’t been enough illustrations of how his approach is distinctive. Watching rushes, Stahr is more alert and perceptive than Brady or the surrounding yes-men: given how Kazan presents these others, that is damning with very faint praise.
The film seems careless from the start – in the reactions of a group of young movie fans to the words of a guide (John Carradine) giving them a tour of the studios, in the shooting of a scene in a romantic drama currently in production there. This black-and-white film-within-the-film doesn’t, in terms of lighting, look like thirties Hollywood product and Jeanne Moreau, as its diva star Didi, doesn’t act in period. Her co-star is Rodriguez (Tony Curtis), an aging heartthrob who, away from the set, is desperately anxious about his impotence. Rodriguez appears younger in the off-screen sequences than he does in rushes, which feels like the wrong way round. When Stahr (Robert De Niro) first looks at Kathleen (Ingrid Boulting), he sees in her the image of his late wife, the actress Minna Davis. This drives his search for Kathleen and reverberates throughout their relationship; Kazan gives hardly any weight to it. As written by Fitzgerald, the affair between Stahr and Kathleen is inexorable yet continuously fragile. The length of screen time given to their love scenes and Kazan’s predictable staging of them, reinforced by his persistent use of Maurice Jarre’s music, muffle both these qualities. A liaison that is meant to be poignantly brief seriously outstays its welcome.
Characters are reduced and the implications of reduction then ignored. Theresa Russell is competent as Cecilia Brady but, since the person she’s playing is now little more than a sad spoilt child, it’s hard to care whether Cecilia has a sophomore crush on Stahr or loves him more complexly (a mystery of substance in Fitzgerald’s manuscript). Although Robert Mitchum has natural, bull-necked authority as Brady, he reveals the man’s inner thug immediately. That’s presumably what Kazan, despising the likes of Brady as he does, wants but the character, without a veneer of plausible, sentimental bonhomie to be penetrated, is merely repetitive – especially since life at the studios isn’t greatly eventful. Pinter’s screenplay does retain the episode in which Brady’s daughter discovers a naked secretary hidden in a cupboard in her father’s office: on screen, the discovery doesn’t come as a shock to Cecilia, let alone the viewer. The pivotal meeting between Stahr and Brimmer (Jack Nicholson), a communist labour organiser based in New York but masterminding the setting up of a union in Hollywood, isn’t abbreviated – but you get the sense this is largely to make it worth Jack Nicholson’s while coming to the party. Still, he livens things up considerably and his appearance gives The Last Tycoon the distinction of being the only film (to date) in which Nicholson and Robert De Niro have shared the screen.
It’s in keeping with the low-key style (verging on inertia) that Stahr doesn’t get the build-up he’s given in the book. At the start, De Niro sounds wrong. His first lines are Stahr’s critical comments on rushes; De Niro delivers the lines as if trying them out – he lacks, as well as precise inflection, any suggestion of authority. Very soon, though, he looks so right – hair, clothes, wiry alertness and strength of purpose – that watching his performance becomes increasingly frustrating: you keep imagining how good he could be if Elia Kazan were handling the material differently. De Niro soon gets to grips with the words too: he’s funny in a later rushes bit, for the Didi-Rodriguez film, when Stahr pours scorn on the dialogue, especially Didi saying – in response to Rodriguez’s ‘I shall never forget you’ – ‘Nor I you’. The trademark crooked grin appears rather too often and easily for the man he’s playing; when he shapes up for a fight with Brimmer, the movement is decidedly Travis Bickle-like. Yet, in spite of Kazan’s worst efforts, De Niro gets tantalisingly close to the heart of Monroe Stahr.
In a letter to his publisher, Fitzgerald wrote of his plans for The Last Tycoon:
‘If one book could ever be ‘like’ another, I should say it is more ‘like’ The Great Gatsby than any of my other books.’
Stahr certainly stands comparison with Gatsby as a romantic man-who-has-everything-but-the-woman-he-longs-for: the idea is intriguingly complicated in The Last Tycoon because of the tension in Stahr’s mind between Kathleen as an evocation of his dead wife and as an object of desire in herself. De Niro’s blend of self-possession and yearning gives Stahr a tragic aspect that briefly resonates with Fitzgerald’s character. Although this derives more from the doomed love affair than from what’s happening at the studio, the closing scenes of the film do more than any previous ones to bind the two things together. Kazan virtually reprises a sequence in which Stahr enacts for Boxley (Donald Pleasence), a culturally snobbish British writer he’s hired to write a picture, how to involve an audience through images rather than words. This second time, Stahr’s demonstration is accompanied by images of Kathleen. The sequence concludes with his saying, to camera, ‘I was only making pictures’.
This feels like a good point to end The Last Tycoon. Instead, Kazan cuts to Stahr going to a window, looking out at Brady getting into a car, Brady looking back … The effect is seriously anticlimactic though Kazan repairs the damage in the very last scene: Stahr walks across a deserted back lot, into a sound stage, and disappears into the dark. It’s an eloquent, elegiac moment – but a summation of Fitzgerald’s themes rather than of the preceding film’s take on them. The cinematographer Victor J Kemper supplies several shots of vast, empty spaces in and around the studios. The shots are individually impressive. They fall short of being expressive because Kazan has disdained to show the hectic side of the dream factory by way of contrast.
There’s only so much that De Niro can do in his scenes with Ingrid Boulting, whose Hollywood career began and ended with this film. Boulting (the ‘face of Biba’ in the late 1960s) has a look, though it doesn’t change much. In view of what draws Stahr to Kathleen in the first place, that unchanging look is a plausible idea; in the event, it merely suggests an unfortunately limited actress. You sense intelligence behind Boulting’s line readings but she’s so vocally unvarying too that it becomes painful listening to her. As well as Tony Curtis and Robert Mitchum, the cast includes significant names from earlier Hollywood eras such as Dana Andrews, Jeff Corey and Ray Milland yet their presence doesn’t add any sort of texture to the film. A rare enjoyable contribution is Seymour Cassel’s cameo as the trainer of a performing seal. At this distance in time, The Last Tycoon has minor interest as a period piece to the extent that it reflects 1970s cynicism about Golden Age Hollywood. It’s inadequate as a recreation of the latter period and as a representation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s final work.
12 August 2018
