On Screen

...The novelist chose Brady's daughter, Cecilia, as narrator...

...Increasingly, there is no room for his kind of personal vision...

...Curtis is actually quite good, bringing to the role of a Latin lover just about the only spark of vitality in this tedious epic...

...In the novel, Wylie White, an "intellectual of the second order," has the same kind of symbiotic relationship with Stahr that Fitzgerald had with Thalberg: The writer needs the producer's money as much as the producer needs the writer's talent...

...The confrontation ends in a drunken brawl, but since we have scarcely been ex?posed to Stahr's paternalism, we cannot really comprehend the nature of his frustration at what he regards as back-stabbing...

...Like his real-life counterpart, Stahr is a creative individualist slowly being squeezed out by the forces of both organized management and organ?ized labor...

...Fitzgerald conceived of the story as "an escape into a lavish, romantic past that perhaps will not come again into our time...

...The single element of the film that captures any trace of these notions is Robert DeNiro's portrayal of Stahr...

...The movie grinds to a halt whenever she is on screen...

...In addition, Pinter distorts Stahr's dealings with his workers...

...Stahr sees in Kathleen his own kind of romantic escape...

...For nearly two years he was a screenwriter at the studio, a job that proved to be a "surprisingly interesting intellectual game...

...Although Wylie is well played by Peter Strauss (the lead in television's Rich Man...

...Not so, though, with the part of Kathleen, the mysterious and romantic catalyst in Stahr's tragedy...

...She is the random element in his otherwise fatefully determined existence...

...Consider, too, how Fitzgerald and Pinter each handled the question of the story's perspective on Holly?wood...

...But Pinter, who also appears to have been hired less for his skill than for his name, must bear most of the blame for the perversion of Fitzgerald's intent...

...Theresa Russell's Cecilia is slattern?ly to the point of reducing her ref?erences to her school days to unintentional hilarity...

...All these complexities are lost in the movie...

...Recalling the MGM spectacles of the '30s, The Last Tycoon reeks of "quality," of the best that money can buy, yet in its failure reveals perhaps more about Hollywood than the novel did...

...What is missing most is the tragic scope of the book...

...one glimpse of her ethereal beauty was enough to send Stahr into the obsessive quest that helps precipitate his downfall...

...He is not obsessed with her merely because she reminds him of his dead wife (the only clue that the movie provides...

...In part, this is the result of some spectacular mis?casting by Spiegel that seems to have been motivated mostly by the desire to land big-name, big-dollar stars, regardless of their suitability...

...His writers regard him as a wise and sometimes ruthless father-figure who is torn, as they are, between the conflicting demands of commerce and art...

...He wanted a point of view that was "of the movies but not in them," yet his strategy had many problems, not the least of which was Cecilia's unbelievable combination of embarrassing coyness and cynical omni?science...

...DeNiro gets very little...

...It has been handsomely mounted by Sam Spiegel, himself one of the old tycoons (the "creative producer" responsible for Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai), and directed by Elia Kazan (whose credits include On the Waterfront) from a screenplay by Harold Pinter...

...HIS AMOUNTS to a real disaster because The Last Tycoon, like all of Fitzgerald's books, is animated by romance...

...Consequently, the climax-otherwise reasonably faithfulto Fitzgerald-seems entirely unmotivated...

...Since he was deeply in debt, a more tangible attraction was the lucrative contract offered by MGM...

...Stahr's affair with Kathleen was, Fitzgerald wrote, "the meat of the book...

...only upon reflection did I realize that he, too, was partly trapped by the weakness of the production...

...The cast?ing couch is supposedly no longer the basis for such choices, but the actresses he picked are so incompetent that one begins to wonder...

...Stahr's tragedy is his complicity in his own downfall: One of the paternalistic entrepreneurs who had been responsible for the industry's growth in the '20s, he has become by the '30s a victim of the system he helped create...

...In the film, he appears merely to be the victim of too much alcohol and too little sympathy for labor's plight...

...I came away from The Last Tycoon thinking he was peculiarly flat and dull...

...The novelist's adolescent notion of true love was both the strength and weakness of his writing, but in The Last Tycoon the romance is effectively integrated into the structure of the work...

...Stahr is not cerebral and his exercise of power can be disturbing, but he is the only producer with the courage to attempt financially risky, artistically worthy films...

...Instead of the ironically bemused detachment that Fitzgerald sought (and felt himself), he renders the story largely from Stahr's viewpoint, with the effect of immersing us in the movies...

...His love scenes are played opposite a zombie, and he can barely relate to the other actors, who on the whole are grotesquely miscast...

...Moreau, who must impersonate a temperamental, foul-mouthed, over-the-hill star, is simply awful...

...His struggle represents the essential conflict in Hollywood, felt so deeply by Fitzgerald himself, between financial and artistic ambi?tions...

...Even good performers need help...

...DeNiro badly needs someone to play against, like Harvey Keitel, his talented costar in Mean Streets and Taxi Driver...

...The Last Tycoon was modeled after Irving Thalberg, the "boy won?der" production chief at MGM...

...The makers of The Last Tycoon have neither learned any?thing from Fitzgerald's own agonized experience with art and commerce, nor fully understood his novel...

...Count?less minutes of precious running time, for example, are squandered on phony "rushes" we are forced to watch along with Stahr...

...Although Fitzgerald's last work was not his best, it was his most ambitious attempt to fashion a con?temporary American tragedy...

...But they do have one purpose: to pad the movie for two more name attractions, Tony Curtis and Jeanne Moreau...

...Watch, for instance, the odd stiffness of his walk, the inhibited stride of a frail man who has allowed his still-young body to pay the price of success...

...Rather, it is her very independence from the destiny he has made for himself that is attractive: "This girl had life-it was very seldom he met anyone whose life did not depend in some way on him or hope to depend on him...

...her ample cheeks and her tiny, toothy mouth make her look like a puffy little rabbit...

...Maybe we are fortunate that Pinter has substantial?ly reduced her role in the film...

...Fitzgerald is careful, however, to spell out the mixture of respect and resentment that Wylie feels for his boss, giving their bond a complicating twist...

...But when the camera lights on the countenance of Ingrid Boulting, the former high-fashion model Spiegel personally selected to portray Kathleen, we can scarcely suspend our disbelief: This is the vision that so haunted Stahr Boult-ing's face is much wider than it is long...

...Pinter overcomes the difficulty by simply ignoring it...

...They have relied on the big-money approach that went out of style with Thalberg, apparently unaware that Thalberg himself learned money alone can never create art...

...In the lavish manner of a Thalberg production of 40 years ago, the movie version is a grand undertak?ing...

...He invents several ominous lines for Mitchum to utter at the outset, thus establishing the conflict with Stahr much earlier than Fitzgerald did and transform?ing the tale of a man caught up in a fate largely of his own making into a melodramatic power struggle be?tween a good guy and a bad guy...

...Like the old star-makers of the past, he made the "daring" decision to have unknowns play the two female leads...

...Under the circumstances, he does as well as anyone possibly could...

...Unfortunately, this confluence of talents has failed to create anything but a big-budget bore...

...She, however, is not Spiegel's worst blunder...

...Fitz?gerald saw Brady, Stahr's chief nemesis at the studio, as "a bulky, middle-aged man who looked a little ashamed of himself," a description that hardly fits Robert Mitchum, who fills the part with a swaggering menace to let us know right away he is a heavy...

...Given the film capital's propensity for feeding on its own myths, it is not surprising that the novel has finally been adapted for the screen...

...Throughout his employment in the film industry he was writing about it, too, so that when he died suddenly in 1940 he left behind six chapters of an unfinished novel on Hollywood...

...and since she isn't glamorous, she cannot even compel our attention...

...Poor Man), the part has almost disappeared from Pinter's script...

...The majority of these film-clips-within-the-film, moreover, are in-authentically reminiscent of the '40s rather than the '30s...

...Stahr learns that his writers are beginning to form a union and arranges a meeting with Brimmer, the Communist organizer from the East (Jack Nicholson, definitely not "on the order of Spencer Tracy," as Fitzgerald pictured the character...

...Still, Babylon has not been re?visited in this dull a fashion for many years...

...What he completed of The Last Tycoon tells the story of Monroe Stahr, a movie producer who "appropriates to himself the total significance of [his] time and place...

...Since she can't act, she does not win our sympathy, except for her obvious discomfort at being in the film in the first place...

...Fitzgerald worked hard to make her "the most glamorous and sympathetic of my heroines...