Babylon Revisited

By JAY COCKS

THE LAST TYCOON

Directed by ELIA KAZAN

Screenplay by HAROLD PINTER

In the thick, solitary splendor of the movie studio, Monroe Stahr weaves dreams. He watches images flicker by in the screening room, demands improvement. Amendments, modifications, excisions--all flow in the sharp, regular rhythm of a master musician keeping time by snapping his fingers. "The last scene was too gory--cut out one roll of the table," or, "Reshoot the whole scene." His taste is peerless, but it would have to be. The production chief of a major studio like MGM in the early '30s, Stahr holds absolute authority.

Stahr cannot credit, either, the fact that there are some people who might decline to share his dreams of patchwork celluloid. Kathleen Moore, a girl Stahr sees as his own perfect romantic vision, a shade of his dead wife, does not even go to the movies. "Why not?" Stahr asks her, seriously puzzled. "Millions of people do. Movies give them what they need." Kathleen contradicts him. "What you need."

The Last Tycoon is a reasonably scrupulous adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished tragedy about the strange refractions of Monroe Stahr's life. It makes for a flawed, divided movie, sometimes full of cool, funny insight, sometimes crippled by the flyaway myths of movietown.

Unwearied Egos. The film shares roughly the strengths and weaknesses of the novel. Perceptions about the giddy excesses and malformed ironies of the movie business come through strongest: the unweaned egos of the people who make movies, the pushcart buccaneering of the studio heads who subsidize them. Monroe Stahr (Robert De Niro) belongs to both worlds. If movies are dreams for him, they are yard goods for his studio colleagues. Stahr insists on making a big-budget quality movie that may never turn a profit. He does it over the protests of the corporate lawyer, Fleishacker (Ray Milland), and Studio Chief Pat Brady (Robert Mitchum), who has described his production chief as a "goddam Vine Street Jesus." As much as his uncertain health and assaults of melancholy, it is good taste that ultimately undoes Stahr and permits Brady and the board of directors to ace him out of his job.

Always a shrewd, careful scenarist (Accident, The Go-Between), Harold Pinter pays particular attention to the functional unreality of moviemaking. In one scene--not from Fitzgerald--a film editor expires noiselessly during the running of a new film. He is slumped in the front-row leather armchair, head rolled to one side in what must have been a last act of deference to the assembled executives. No last words, not even a cry for help. "He probably didn't want to disturb the screening," muses one of the nabobs.

The movie also contains Director Elia Kazan's most assured work in a decade. Scenes like Kathleen's first appearance--Stahr sees her on a set, in the aftermath of an earthquake, floating down a man-made river aboard the great plaster head of a mythological goddess--are brought off with the checked flamboyance characteristic of the best in Panic in the Streets and East of Eden. Kazan has certainly lost none of his assurance with actors. De Niro makes an appropriately remote Stahr, bright or shaded depending on the circumstances and angle of view. Mitchum, Milland, Tony Curtis (as an aging superstar), Dana Andrews (as a fading director) and Jack Nicholson (very canny as a Communist union organizer) fill in their roles . with quick, bold strokes.

Smitten Fascination. All these virtues can make The Last Tycoon a pleasure. They do not make it a success. Kazan and Pinter go smarmy in the romantic episodes, where Fitzgerald struggled for--and found--a saving, tough-minded detachment. Here, Kathleen is rendered with the same smitten fascination that overcame Stahr. She is played by Newcomer Ingrid Boulting (stepdaughter of British Producer Roy Boulting) with a sort of spacey spirituality that seems part Pre-Raphaelite, part post-psychedelic. Theresa Russell, who plays Brady's daughter, the proud possessor of a crush on Stahr, is around more than her role and meager talent require.

The crucial, finally crushing problem with The Last Tycoon, however, is that it half credits some of the most insubstantial legends of Hollywood. The movie does improve Fitzgerald's convoluted plans for ending the novel, which required a murder and a plane crash. Here, Stahr is swallowed up in the looming darkness of a sound stage. It is a lovely, but treacherously romantic image. In effect, Kazan and Pinter turn their own movie into another part of Stahr's dream. The movie is about the sad solitude that power brings, the high price of genius. These are shallow, narcissistic notions, not so much out of place as out of focus. It was Hollywood, after all, that helped create such ideas, and has done so much to perpetuate them. Jay Cocks

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