The Last Tycoon (1976)

Truly Dreadful Film

Far from Perfect, Far from Terrible

Awesome Movie

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

As much as I wanted to like The Last Tycoon, because the story was originated by F. Scott Fitzgerald, I just couldn't get through it. It takes a lot to make me actually turn off a movie, but I was so incredibly bored my eyelids were actually drooping. Basically, Robert De Niro stars as a producer in old Hollywood, and the film follows his various dealings with Hollywood stars, executives, and backstage personnel. Old timers like Tony Curtis, Robert Mitchum, Ray Milland, John Carradine, and Dana Andrews have fun with reliving the "good old days", and modern stars like Jack Nicholson, Donald Pleasence, Jeanne Moreau, Theresa Russell, Peter Strauss, and Anjelica Huston get to dress up and pretend they're in the 1940s. As sometimes happens, when you get a huge cast together, the magic is spent in publicizing the party invitations rather than the party itself. I didn't really like this one even though there are several cast members I remembered fondly from the era The Last Tycoon takes place in.

Horrible rendition of decent Fitzgerald story-DeNiro and major stars were good- TONY Curtis and model playing DeNiro love interest were the worst ever!!! Storyline moved along well when the major stars were on screen BUT time just stood still when the other two were on screen! THERESA Russell was drop dead gorgeous in this film.

I stopped reading Fitzgerald's novel about half way through because it was embarrassingly bad, coming as it did after his masterpiece, "The Great Gatsby," and left unedited. The film isn't much of an advance as far as plot is concerned. It's more of a character sketch than a gripping story. A man only loves two things and loses them both.But what a cast and crew! Elia Kazan directs De Niro, Mitchum, Curtis, Moreau, Nicholson, Theresa Russell, Donald Pleasance, Ray Milland, Jeff Corey, Dana Andrews, Angelica Huston, and other familiar presences in a screenplay by Harold Pinter from a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. What a pedigree.De Niro has never been better, not even as an Italian-American hood. He's thrown himself into the role, altering his appearance so that he's hardly recognizable -- pale, very thin, perceptive, sensitive, taciturn, blunt.As the Thalberg figure at MGM, he loves making movies. He's as demanding with himself as he is with everyone else. He has no genuine social life until he falls in love at first sight with Ingrid Boulting. That's the second thing he loves. And after she has a brief fling with him, she ditches him to marry another man. Boulting, alas, isn't much of an actress. She has a fine figure but the overall impression she generates in the viewer is that of some kind of animated, life-sized kewpie doll. The other recognizable names in the cast don't really have much to do, while Boulting has too much screen time.The final scene, after De Niro is fired, is pretty stylized. He repeats an earlier scene, this time speaking directly to the camera, and the last we see of him is when his figure disappears into the vast, black maw of an empty sound stage. The real Thalberg died of a heart ailment while still in his thirties. Sad.

... was in attempting to film this great unfinished novel in the first place, the second was employing an English writer and the third was casting Robert de Niro in the lead. DeNiro's definition of 'Acting' is to shout at the top of his voice and behave like a sociopath. Unfortunately lots of people - some of them influential - who should know better have applauded this and encouraged him to continue. Monroe Stahr is diametrically opposite DeNiro, a thoughtful, quiet intellectual light years away from DeNiro's wise guy whose solution to problems on the studio floor would be to kick the director to death and throw acid into the faces of the actors. Even Gadg can't do anything with this so he elected to shoot it as though everyone were under water wading through molasses. Virtually no one relates to anyone else least of all Stahr and Kathleen. Scott must be turning in his grave.