The Last Tycoon would seem to be a trap waiting for the foolish filmmaker. Controversial writer F. Scott Fitzgerald got barely halfway through it before his premature death, and critics have been debating the merit of the published result ever since, trying to gauge what its potential might have been. 'Boy wonder' Fitzgerald's book concerned a 'boy wonder' loosely based on MGM's Irving Thalberg, who also died at a young age.

The book is about a changing Hollywood, one incapable of making great films out of books like The Great Gatsby. It tried twice. In 1976, Elia Kazan came out of retirement for one last push at greatness, in this beautifully-mounted production that uses more interesting actors, old and new, than any film has since. Kazan proves himself capable of marshaling new stars De Niro and Nicholson and making them mesh with actors from earlier eras.

How does one find a screenwriter for a book without an ending? Playwright Harold Pinter successfully wrote several Joseph Losey pictures, none of which bothered with a conventional ending. The movie ends up an open-ended question mark filmed with taste and discretion by a genuine Hollywood master.

I was charmed by The Last Tycoon when it was new, and it only seems better on DVD. I think it was the first film where Robert De Niro played a character even remotely likeable. His Monroe Stahr is a fascinating man, an organizational genius who exudes charm and control while ruling his studio. This is probably an improvement on the real Irving Thalberg, who would have been loved by Hollywood simply for not being an infantile tyrant like Cohn or Mayer. Like Thalberg, Monroe Stahr has taste and discretion and can foster difficult talent and wrangle creative egos while not straining a hair on his head. Even an earthquake fazes him not. His films are everything. ¹

Kazan paints a dreamlike image of studio life, without the satirical venom of The Day of the Locust. It's a fiefdom with pawns and players, where people talk or don't talk to others depending on their class within the system. Monroe handles them all beautifully. The financial executives (Robert Mitchum, Ray Milland) grouse about his 'artistic' ideas getting in the way of commerce, and talk fearfully of the commies in the writer's group. He's particularly good at motivating his creative talent, whether giving a sloppy director (Dana Andrews, of Kazan's Boomerang! 27 years earlier) a dressing-down, or inspiring a jaded novelist (Donald Pleasance) to believe that, in movie terms, the simple act of observing unexplained actions can take the place of literate prose. ²

Footnotes:

1. Savant likes to 'collect' scenes about film editors in Hollywood sagas. Here the top cutter at Monroe's studio dies of a heart attack right in the middle of a daily screening, and nobody finds out until the lights come up. An assistant says the dead man probably didn't want to disrupt Stahr's concentration!
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2. De Niro's coy play-acting in his office fascinates and charms us as much as it does Pleasance's stuffy author. Real Hollywood moguls were famous for staging elaborate personal 'performances' to get their way (see the Cohn substitute Stanley Hoff in Robert Aldrich's The Big Knife) and Monroe's gentle pantomime should go down as a great moment in film history, about film history. The astute casting makes all the difference - Pleasance's performance is more focused than most of the genre work he was churning out at the time, and for a seasoned 'lady writer' by his side, Tycoon casts Betsy-Jones Moreland, the Corman actress from The Last Woman on Earth. It's possible that both her presence and that of Angelica (Anjelica) Huston were the doing of co-star Jack Nicholson.
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