The Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
The University of Detroit's main campus is located directly in the path of Detroit's advancing color line. In the euphemism of our times, it is an increasingly 'inner city' school. It is...
...When $tahr goes to pieces and loses control of the studio after Kathleen jilts him in the film, it's the equivalent of riot and disorder...
...One wonders whether Pinter might not have looked to West, as Fitzgerald's friend and Hollywood contemporary, for help ending Tycoon...
...Stahr is, to his and Fitzgerald's credit, full of warnings for writers against this sort of self-pity...
...I hope that the Jesuits will opt for an identity which is going in that direction, because I would like to see the University fulfill the humane possibilities which history has placed on her doorstep...
...In the case of Detroit, there is a whole city that can either benefit or experience one more large defeat, depending on how the Jesuits come out of this...
...The parallel between the story in the novel and the story of the novel creates a peculiar kind of reverberation in our reading of it...
...Something there is in Hollywood that doesn't like a writer...
...It would be a victory for the cosmopolitan values and purposes of the 'catholic tradition' generally and the traditional Jesuit commitment to excellence under socially exigent conditions...
...If it were not for the fact that I work in one of their institutions and have hopes for what it might become, I would not venture to discuss the identity problems of a group to which I do not belong...
...21 .rmmary 1977:52...
...Here Stahr throws parties and even takes a date despite the fact there is no roof...
...The novel begins ominously as a cross-country flight Stahr is on is grounded by weather half way to the Coast and a fellow passenger, a has-been producer who fails to buttonhole Stahr as he had hoped, decides not to go on in order to kill himself instead...
...The scenario $tahr makes up is about a woman interrupted while apparently disposing of incriminating evidence, but Stahr cuts short the scenario itself in order to tantalize the novelist, who has in turn interrupted Stahr's schedule by coming in in the first place...
...By reincorporating bits of dialogue or imagery from the scene with Boxley, the film makes its equation with Kathleen quite unmistakable...
...Unable to work under the studio system, Boxley comes to Stahr's office to do his fretting...
...Stahr responds by improvising a little scene, in which Stahr himself stars, in order to give Boxley a better idea what kind of material plays in movies...
...And so Stahr's day goes...
...It is the denominational dilemma which is built into the American civil religion...
...There is nothing incompatible with a high Jesuit profile committed to maintaining a decent, pluralistic and racially integrated university in Detroit...
...Even at the present, there is only a bare majority of Roman Catholic undergraduates...
...The whole episode is like a series of open-ended boxes within boxes...
...There is no question that Pinter was alert to the theme o[ interruption and incompletion Fitzgerald ran through his novel, for it is out of that theme that Pinter has attempted to make an ending for the novel...
...Sociologically this is far and away the most important element in whatever future the University may have...
...It would be a risk, an entry into new worlds, demanding new competencies and requiring radically new sources of support for Jesuit education, not only in terms of money, but also in terms of consent and participation in the enterprise...
...It is already difficult, and in the future it can only become more so, to conceive of a school at its present location as a Roman Catholic school for Roman Catholic students playing a vital role in the making or the remaking of any sort of specifically Roman Catholic culture...
...What compounds in disturbing and perhaps irreparable ways this vision of Stahr's life Fitzgerald had is the fact that Fitzgerald's own life seems finally to have conformed to it...
...This makes the emotional effect the novel has on us a disconcerting sensation much as feedback is disconcerting when we are trying to listen to a radio program...
...And what he imagines is a variation on that scene he improvised earlier with BoxleymKathleen in the midst of burning a letter she had tried to write him, surprised by the man she's been living with and giving herself over to him at last, etc...
...It requires the informed, enthusiastic and engaged participation of too many diverse parties for that...
...but it makes a world of difference which one is considered the dependent variable of the other...
...Like the scenario Stahr spins out for Boxley, the novel Fitzgerald was writing for us was left unfinish~, and this makes the portion we do have seem intractable, imponderable, in certain respects...
...In the movie version, when Stahr (Robert De Niro) receives the telegram from Kathleen (Ingrid Boulting), he imagines in a cross-cut sequence what happened to make her break off with him ~ abruptly...
...It is as if the Jesuits at this University could not make up their minds which life they were fighting for: their own in relation to the Church and her foreseeable institutional destiny, or the life of a decent university in the midst of a deeply troubled city...
...Granted the two may be related...
...Maybe that's where the problem is...
...It would also be an expensive commitment, requiring the full resources of the Order and many, many others to succeed...
...Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust, and the film John Schlesinger made from it a year or two ago, comes to the same conclusion...
...As it stands, however, there are whole institutions which are experiencing disruption as the Jesuits undergo conflict over their identity...
...Acting out all parts himself, Stahr proposes a woman who enters an office and begins to burn a pair of black gloves in a stove, but stops short when the phone rings, explaining to whoever is on the line that she's never owned any black gloves . . . . When Stahr resumes his seat at this point, Boxley, engrossed, asks what happens next...
...It is not only the trivial incidents, such as this with Boxley, but the most important in his life as well Ihat follow this pattern...
...Perhaps it is here, in the way English playwright Pinter has transformed this second scene devoted to English novelist Boxley, that we see where the significant similarity between art and life really lies in this movie...
...but it is one of the least discussed elements in the current search for a 'religious identity ~ for the University...
...The effect, however, is much too neat and easy...
...In so doing it tries as well to give some definitive meaning to her departure, to turn it into a revelation that will satisfy us and make us feel that the story is now whole...
...Typical is the intrusion into Stahr's appointment schedule of a prima donna English novelist named Boxley whom the studio has hired...
...I say that this condition is probably irreparable because in doing the script for Ella Kazan's new movie of The Last Tycoon, playwright Harold Pinter has tried to repair this incompleteness in the novel, and he has failed miserably...
...It is not a situation in which ambiguous claims to want both will sufrice...
...In the third chapter we are given an account of a day in the life of this movie mogul, a "boy wonder" whom Fitzgerald modeled on MGM production chief Irving Thaiberg, and the main impression we get is of a life of continuous interruption and incompletion...
...The date Stahr takes there is a very special one, Kathleen, who at first attracts him because she looks like his dead wife...
...In Pinter's adaptation of Fitzgerald the catastrophe at the end wrecks only one life and does so in a very private way, whereas in the West-Schlesinger version an entire society is engulfed right before our eyes...
...That possibility, however, cannot be actualized on a sectarian basis...
...Though most women would be glad to attract Stahr, Kathleen is not...
...The traditional constituency for 'Jesuit education' is increasingly reluctant to cross the color line in order to get it...
...From where I sit, it looks as if the crisis in Jesuit education arises very much from the same dilemma which a democratic society imposes on all religious denominations insofar as they are unable to settle for a merely sectarian identity: on the one hand, their confessional particularity is their only reason for existing apart lrom the rest of society while, on the other hand, their vision of and contribution to the general welfare is a necessary justification for their existing in society...
...Such a commitment, indeed, would be an act of high civic as well as ecclesiastical leadership...
...Indeed, so goes his entire life...
...It would be avery concrete embodiment of religions values in a city grown weary of the constant defeat of humane values...
...It seems that the Jesuit jury is still out deciding whether their new corporate apostolate will give priority to the sectarian basis or the cosmopolitan purposes of the Order...
...In reassessing the character and direction of their corporate existence, the Jesuits are face to face with this dilemma...
...Just as the little all-purpose scenario Stahr dreams up for Boxley is now realized in the film by Stahr's tragic love affair, so West's hero, a studio art director, sees some of his art work coming to life in a riot that occurs at the end of Locust...
...It is, in fact, out of Stahr's session with Boxley (Donald Pleasence) that Pinter has attempted to do so...
...Both Pinter and West seem to have felt badly compromised working in Hollywood, and they were trying to turn their disaffection with themselves into something that's wrong with Hollywood rather than wrong with them...
...This d3nouement forces on Fitzgerald's story the kind of flashy, pat equation between art and life that we find all too often in novels or movies about moviemaking...
...Sidney Mead identified this as a dilemma which emerged in 19th century America and which none of the religious bodies has proven very adept at even facing, theologically...
...But since Monroe Stahr is meant to he an embodiment of that society, I guess it's all the same...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 The organizing principle of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon--or rather, its disorganizing principle--is supplied by the life of its hero, Monroe Stahr...
...This interrupted flight that results in an interrupted life sets the tone for Stahr's own life, which seems to have its perfeet emblem in a beach house that Stahr has never completed building...
...Boxley...
...In Pinter's screenplay, on the other hand, the second scene with Boxley has been rewritten to show him a failure storming out of the studio in a fit of alcoholism...
...I CommomveM: 51 don't know" Stahr says with a grin, "I was just making pictures...
...There are civic as well as ecclesiastical consequences either way...
...That is one of the surprising and baffling aspects of the turmoil which this University has suffered in recent years: the persistent attempt to define a confessional identity for the University...
...Consequently, even his love affair with her, which is the central event of the novel, ends unfinished when she suddenly breaks off with him by means of a telegram saying she's married someone else...
...That's really the import of the way Stahr handles the temperamental Mr...
...COLIN L, WESTERBECK, JR...
...In the novel Stahr's ploy works, too, for in the one subsequent scene with Boxley, having learned the lesson Stahr had to teach, Boxley deals successfully with other writers' blocks much as Stahr did with his...
...The failure of both Pinter's screenplay and West's novel is that their endings have a fake alienation about them in the equation they make between movie art and ruined life...
Vol. 104 • January 1977 • No. 2
