The Last Tycoon is a 1976 American period romantic drama film directed by Elia Kazan and produced by Sam Spiegel, based on Harold Pinter’s screenplay adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel The Last Tycoon. It stars Robert De Niro and features Tony Curtis, Robert Mitchum, Jack Nicholson, Donald Pleasence, Jeanne Moreau, Theresa Russell and Ingrid Boulting.
The film is the second collaboration between Kazan and Spiegel, who worked together to make On the Waterfront (1954). Fitzgerald based the novel’s protagonist Monroe Stahr on film producer Irving Thalberg. Spiegel was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award.
The Last Tycoon did not receive the critical acclaim that much of Kazan’s earlier work had received, but it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Art Direction (Gene Callahan, Jack T. Collis and Jerry Wunderlich).
The story was Fitzgerald’s last, unfinished novel, as well as the last film that Kazan directed, although he lived until 2003.
Plot
Monroe Stahr is the young production chief and the most creative executive with one of the biggest studios during the Golden Age of Hollywood. He is a tireless worker in a time of turmoil in the industry due to the creation of the Writers Guild of America. Monroe is accustomed to making his underlings, including screenwriters, do whatever he says.
Monroe’s life flows between film shootings, industry bosses’ machinations, discussions with writers and actors and a battle with a union organizer named Brimmer, whose intrusion he resents. In the meantime, Monroe becomes obsessed with a young woman, Kathleen Moore, with a troubled past, who is engaged to be married to another man. Cecilia Brady, the young daughter of a studio board member, tries in vain to make Monroe see how she truly feels about him.
Pat Brady and other studio executives resent Monroe’s neglect and disrespect of their wishes. Interpreting his treatment of the union organizer as the last straw, they insist that Monroe go away for a long rest. As his difficulties grow bigger and his health declines, Monroe’s life runs to an uncertain but inevitable twilight.
Cast
Robert De Niro as Monroe Stahr
Tony Curtis as Rodriguez
Robert Mitchum as Pat Brady
Jeanne Moreau as Didi
Jack Nicholson as Brimmer
Donald Pleasence as George Boxley
Ray Milland as Fleishacker
Dana Andrews as Red Ridingwood
Ingrid Boulting as Kathleen Moore
Peter Strauss as Wylie White
Theresa Russell as Cecilia Brady
Tige Andrews as Popolos
Morgan Farley as Marcus
John Carradine as Tour guide
Jeff Corey as Doctor
Diane Shalet as Stahr’s secretary
Seymour Cassel as Seal trainer
Anjelica Huston as Edna
Production
Themes
The character of Monroe Stahr is full of associations to Irving Thalberg, the production chief at M-G-M in the period of the late 1920s and the 1930s. The background is Hollywood when studios made 30-to-40 productions a year, and every backlot could simultaneously sustain motion pictures being set in multiple locations around the world. The background of the film has a close bond to stories of Hollywood at that time, as well as to Fitzgerald’s life and career.
The themes of unfinished ambitions and the unattained love of the young and beautiful in Hollywood, embodied by the beach house, have great significance for both the novelist and director at the end of their luminary careers.
Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote:
None of the changes that Mr. Pinter has made in the novel seem to me to damage the style or mood of the book. More than any other screen adaptation of a Fitzgerald work—with the exception of Joan Micklin Silver’s fine adaptation of the short story Bernice Bobs Her Hair—The Last Tycoon preserves original feeling and intelligence. The movie is full of echoes. We watch it as if at a far remove from what’s happening, but that too is appropriate: Fitzgerald was writing history as it happened.
