The Last Tycoon | |
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Directed by | Elia Kazan |
Screenplay by | Harold Pinter |
Based on | The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald |
Produced by | Sam Spiegel |
Starring | |
Cinematography | Victor J. Kemper |
Edited by | Richard Marks |
Music by | Maurice Jarre |
Production companies |
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Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
Release date |
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Running time | 123 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $5.5 million [1] |
Box office | $1.8 million [1] |
The Last Tycoon is a 1976 American period romantic drama film directed by Elia Kazan and produced by Sam Spiegel, based upon Harold Pinter's screenplay adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel The Last Tycoon . It stars Robert De Niro, Tony Curtis, Robert Mitchum, Jack Nicholson, Donald Pleasence, Jeanne Moreau, Theresa Russell and Ingrid Boulting.
The film was the second collaboration between Kazan and Spiegel, who worked closely together to make On the Waterfront . Fitzgerald based the novel's protagonist, Monroe Stahr, on film producer Irving Thalberg. Spiegel was once awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award.
The Last Tycoon did not receive the critical acclaim that much of Kazan's earlier work received, considering the level of talent involved, but it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Art Direction (Gene Callahan, Jack T. Collis, and Jerry Wunderlich).
The story itself was Fitzgerald's last, unfinished novel, as well as the last film Kazan directed, even though he lived until 2003.
Monroe Stahr is the young production chief and the most creative executive of one of the biggest studios of the Golden Age of Hollywood. He is a tireless worker in a time of turmoil in the industry due to the creation of the Writers Guild of America; Monroe is accustomed to making his underlings, including screenwriters, do whatever he says.
Monroe's life flows between film shootings, industry bosses' machinations, discussions with writers and actors and a battle with a union organizer named Brimmer, whose intrusion he resents. In the meantime, Monroe becomes obsessed with a young woman with a troubled past, Kathleen Moore, who is engaged to be married to another man. Cecilia Brady, the young daughter of a studio board member, tries in vain to make Monroe see how she truly feels about him.
Pat Brady and other studio executives resent Monroe's neglect and disrespect for their wishes. Seeing his treatment of the union organizer as the last straw, they insist that Monroe go away for a long rest. As his difficulties grow bigger and his health declines, Monroe's life runs to an uncertain but inevitable twilight that echoes a long gone era.
The character Monroe Stahr is full of associations to Irving Thalberg, the production chief at M-G-M in the period between the late 1920s and 1930s. The background is Hollywood in the Golden Thirties, when studios made 30 to 40 productions a year and every backlot could simultaneously sustain motion pictures being set in multiple locations around the world such as New York City, Africa, the South Pole and Montmartre. The background of the film has a close bond to stories of Hollywood at that time, as well as to Fitzgerald's own life and career.
The theme of unfinished ambitions and the unattained love of the young and beautiful in Hollywood, embodied by the beach house, have great significance for both the Novelist and Director at the end of their luminary careers.[ citation needed ]
Vincent Canby of The New York Times writes:
None of the changes that Mr. Pinter has made in the novel seem to me to damage the style or mood of the book. More than any other screen adaptation of a Fitzgerald work—with the exception of Joan Micklin Silver's fine adaptation of the short story Bernice Bobs Her Hair —The Last Tycoon preserves original feeling and intelligence. The movie is full of echoes. We watch it as if at a far remove from what's happening, but that too is appropriate: Fitzgerald was writing history as it happened. [2]
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Retrospective critical perception of The Last Tycoon has been tepid. Having evaluated 27 reviews published between 2000 and 2024, Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes shows a rating of 33%. [3]
Irving Grant Thalberg was an American film producer during the early years of motion pictures. He was called "The Boy Wonder" for his youth and ability to select scripts, choose actors, gather production staff, and make profitable films, including Grand Hotel, China Seas, A Night at the Opera, Mutiny on the Bounty, Camille and The Good Earth. His films carved out an international market, "projecting a seductive image of American life brimming with vitality and rooted in democracy and personal freedom", states biographer Roland Flamini.
The Last Tycoon is an unfinished novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. In 1941, it was published posthumously under this title, as prepared by his friend Edmund Wilson, a critic and writer. According to Publishers Weekly, the novel is "generally considered a roman à clef", with its lead character, Monroe Stahr, modeled after film producer Irving Thalberg. The story follows Stahr's rise to power in Hollywood, and his conflicts with rival Pat Brady, a character based on MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer.
Samuel P. Spiegel was an American independent film producer. Financially responsible for some of the most critically acclaimed motion pictures of the 20th century, Spiegel produced films that won the Academy Award for Best Picture three times, a Hollywood first for a sole independent producer.
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Ingrid Boulting is an actress and model, daughter of actress turned fashion model Enid Munnik step-daughter of English film-maker Roy Boulting and step-niece of John Boulting and Sydney Boulting a.k.a. Peter Cotes. Boulting was brought up from age two to nine by her grand-parents when her mother moved to London in 1949 to start a career as one of the most successful fashion models of the 1950s and early 1960s. Ingrid moved to England aged 9 and trained as a ballet dancer at the Royal Ballet School in Richmond. At Ballet School, aged 15, Ingrid was photographed by Bob Willoughby and appeared on the cover of Queen magazine as a student ballerina. She embarked on an acting career at the Oxford Playhouse, had minor roles in British Films and later became a fashion model. In a memorable photograph by Sarah Moon she became a Biba shop poster subject. In 1976, Boulting starred in The Last Tycoon, the last film directed by famed director Elia Kazan, written by Harold Pinter based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's Hollywood novel The Last Tycoon, and produced by Sam Spiegel.
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Stahr is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigmatic writings of the Jazz Age. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with age and despair.
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The Last Tycoon is an American television series, originating from a pilot produced in 2016 as part of Amazon Studios' seventh pilot season. The show stars Matt Bomer and Kelsey Grammer and is loosely based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's last book, the unfinished and posthumously published 1941 novel The Last Tycoon. Amazon picked up the pilot to series on July 27, 2016. The first season premiered on July 28, 2017. On September 9, 2017, Amazon cancelled the series.
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"The Last Tycoon" is a 1957 episode of the American television series Playhouse 90 based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald.