“The past is a foreign country” writes novelist L.P. Hartley (most famous for authoring Fly-fishing, of course) at the start of The Go-Between, and you’ve got to admit he was onto something. Certainly old films strike me as somewhat “foreign” and it’s really hard sometimes to get a handle on things that happened decades and decades before you were even born; you may have noticed that here at Days Are Numbers we categorise our films as “Talkies”, this is a jokey reference to the distinction once required necessary to indicate that a film actually had some talking in it! How archaic such a notion seems now, although perhaps it would be for the best if more films these days didn’t have any talking in them. Films starring twats like Seth Rogen, namely.

I normally tell anyone who can be bothered to listen to me that I am mainly interested in films released from 1958 onwards, the year that Le Beau Serge, the first film of the French New Wave, was made. As far as I can make out the French New Wave signals the beginning of cinema’s rebirth as a more complete and sophisticated artform. This process continues through several international “new wave” movements in the 1960s and culminates, perhaps even climaxes, with the New American Cinema of the 1970s. It’s not that I don’t like any films made before 1958 (in fact, I downright love far too many to mention; Bergman, Fuller, Lang, Kurosawa, Melville, Hitchcock, Powell/Pressburger, Sirk, Welles etc.), it’s just that I only really fully grasp the chronology of modern cinema. What I’m trying to say is… I’ve never even seen a film with Douglas Fairbanks in it… When I think of “The Golden Age of Hollywood” I think of The Godfather, not Gone with the Wind.

The Last Tycoon is a film made during the second Golden Age of Hollywood about the first Golden Age of Hollywood. The leading directors of the later era were of course greatly influenced by the leading directors of the past, but this influence was tempered by a desire to emulate the economical, personal filmmaking of the international giants of the generation directly before. Large-scale, high-budget and lavish epics were no longer de riguer and this is perhaps why the man behind the camera on The Last Tycoon is Elia Kazan, a survivor from the dying days of the Old Hollywood. A survivor, but only just.

Elia Kazan made some terrific films in the early to mid-50s; chiefly A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, and East of Eden. It’s a good job he did, too, otherwise he’d probably be exclusively remembered as a dirty rat who ratted on several of his communist friends (Kazan was once a member of the American Communist Party) during the deplorable anti-”Reds” show trials conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committe at the start of the Cold War. You may well recollect an elderly Kazan collecting a lifetime achievement Oscar to a mixed chorus of cheers and boos a few years ago.

But let’s not dwell on all that today… Many of the leading lights of the New Hollywood may have been wary of Kazan for his past personal discrepancies, but there could never be any doubt regarding his talent. Having been a major player in the Hollywood studio system of yesteryear himself, Kazan was the perfect choice to direct a film about those very days, and furthermore a film about those days based on a novel written at the time by none other than F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Love of the Last Tycoon, no I’ve not read it either).

The last remnants of the old school Hollywood studio system were all but blown away by the fiercely independent and powerful directors of the New Hollywood, but The Last Tycoon looks back to a time when directors had very little real power at all. Instead uber-producers, movie moguls if you like, ruled the roost; men like Monroe Stahr, the central character in Kazan’s film, and a loose portrait of real-life Universal Pictures mogul Irving Thalberg. Stahr, like Thalberg, is a highly regarded boy genius, one of the studios top men and barely out of his twenties. The film follows him racing around from lot to set to boardroom, viewing rushes here, editing scripts there, and sweet talking bloated egos everywhere. He may be immensely successful, not to mention capable, but hey, this is F. Scott Fitzgerald, so his life is far from complete. Stahr bitterly lost the love of his life a long time ago, but when he chances upon a young starlet who is almost the double for that love, he does everything in his power to make her his own. For the first time in his life, things might not be about to go his way. 

The Last Tycoon is not quite brilliant, but it is certainly an interesting and memorable film. One of the most compelling things about it is the sheer weight of acting talent featured therein. Robert De Niro takes the lead as Stahr, and a dynamic, determined performance reminds you (if you needed reminding!) of exactly why he is generally regarded as the finest acting talent of the second-half of the last century (1976 was also, of course, the year De Niro starred in Taxi Driver… Talk about range!). If that weren’t enough, this De Niro-driven piece sometimes feels like it’s a series of heavyweight encounters between Ol’ Bob and acting icons of the past, present and future. The Last Tycoon is packed with riveting scenes featuring De Niro opposite Robert Mitchum, Ray Milland, Dana Andrews, Tony Curtis, Donald Pleasence, Jeanne Moreau, Jack Nicholson, and Seymour Cassel. Future stars Theresa Russell and Anjelica Huston crop up in their first and just-about-first film roles as well, respectively.

Of the above encounters, the scenes between De Niro and Nicholson perhaps holds the most interest, remaining as they do the only screen time the two have shared together. My favourite scene in the film (and one of my favourite scenes from any film of all time), however, is one in which Stahr gives pompous English playwright Boxley (Pleasence) a crash-course in the art of writing for the screen. The scene marks a highly watchable juxtaposition of two very different acting styles and personalities; somewhat hammy horror veteran Pleasence vs. method mad De Niro. It is also an exquisitedly written scene, but then that’s not surprising, as the great Harold Pinter was responsible for adapting Fitzgerald’s novel. Interestingly enough, Pinter made his name in the movies by scripting a series of minor Brit classics (The Servant, Accident, and funnily enough, an adaptation of L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between) for exiled American director Joseph Losey. Exiled, of course, after being blacklisted by the old Hollywood studios following his name being mentioned in the HUAC trials, in which Elia Kazan infamously pointed a cowardly finger. Strange how it all fits together.

But yeah, The Last Tycoon ain’t that brilliant a film. Certainly not as brilliant a film as you imagine a film directed by Elia Kazan, starring De Niro, Mitchum, Nicholson et al, and adapted from F. Scott Fitzgerald by Harold Pinter might be. Maybe that’s it’s problem, just too much talent vying for attention, but The Last Tycoon ultimately struggles to go anywhere. What it does manage however, is to be a credible, handsome, melancholy, and intriguing insight into an age of filmmaking that was fading in living memory at the time, and now almost gone forever. If like me you’re interested but mystified by the wondrous world of Hollywood between the wars, it could be the rich, heady snapshot you’re after.

I bet you’re dying to know what happened when Robert met Donald, aren’t you? Well, feast your eyes below!

Tags donald pleasance elia kazan film of the day robert de niro the last tycoon