Last Tycoon  

By David Chute

Very little of the energy and intensity of Elia Kazan's great early work remains in his last movie, a flat adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished final novel about a Hollywood movie mogul of the 1930s. The story still feels like a half-written first draft, a grab bag of roughed-out scenes, even though Harold Pinter supposedly polished up the screenplay. Robert De Niro manages a silky, nuanced performance as the mogul, Monroe Stahr (modeled upon MGM's Irving Thalberg, the suave vulgarian who eviscerated Eric Von Stroheim's Greed), and works hard to transform this essayistic conceit of a character, a sexually repressed guru of mass audience manipulation, into a plausible wounded human being. The movie gets a welcome jolt of energy whenever vivid supporting players like Jack Nicholson, Tony Curtis, Robert Mitchum, or Theresa Russell turn up.

Academy Awards

Last Tycoon received an Academy Awards nomination for Art Direction/Set Decoration (Gene Callahan - Art Direction, Jack Collis - Art Direction, Jerry Wunderlich - Set Decoration).

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