Ah, yes: I still
remember my parents walking through the door from the garage into the den in
our childhood home and telling us the movie The Last Tycoon stank. I was
always curious to see it after that. I have seen it before, but it was on last
night, and it was like I saw it for the first time. (I was ignorant of all the
movie history and had never read F. Scott Fitzgerald when I saw it first. You
really need all that background to appreciate the movie, such as it is; without
that background, what a mess! I mean, it's a mess anyway, but at least you kind
of know where it's coming from with the right background knowledge.)
As you probably
know, the movie is based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's last, unfinished, novel, that
was based on Irving Thalberg, the "boy wonder" from, first Universal
Pictures, and then MGM, who died in 1936 and was married to Norma Shearer, the
so-called "Queen of Hollywood". (<Well, she was until he died,
anyway. She was a very good actress who was passed over by the Ziegfeld
Follies and took her chance going to Hollywood, and, seeing a defenseless
young unmarried nerd as the effective head of the studio, she laid out the
honey trap and married him. But she couldn't predict he'd die in 1936, her last
year as the Queen of Hollywood, for some reason.) He was apparently the “tough
man it takes to make a tender chicken”* of the 1930s Hollywood movie industry.
Originally
everyone, critics included, gave The Last Tycoon a failing grade. Now,
however, it has been reappraised to a glowing status. I guess that's because it
stars stars like a young Robert de Niro and was directed by Elia Kazan and is
based on something by F. Scott Fitzgerald. (The "F" was because he
failed high school English, and he wanted to rub in his success to the teacher
who failed him. Just kidding. But Fitzgerald did flunk out of Princeton, so my
joke theory could still have some merit after all.)
The story and
major theme are as follows: the controlling man who controls everyone else
falls for a woman he cannot control, and that lack of control makes him lose
control of himself, and then of his job, and then of his life: I get it. Heavy.
I think this was Fitzgerald's combination of Thalberg, his own loss of control
due to Zelda's mental illness, his resultant alcoholism (but then again, I
suppose that was always there), and of course, L. B. Mayer's daughter,
who we all know loved and married not Thalberg, but David O. Selznick, of whom
the MGM staff used to quip, after his marriage to the boss’s daughter:
"The son-in-law also rises." (But Selznick earned his way on
everything, by the way, so while it’s amusing, I think the quip was
unwarranted: he was in charge of production at RKO for a few years, produced King
Kong, among many other Golden Age classics, and then founded his own studio
after some MGM work, as we all know now, making classics like Gone with the
Wind and Rebecca.) But F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940, and he may
not have been around to see much after 1936. He was hired at great expense to
write screenplays after The Great Gatsby, but he was never very good at
screen writing, and it was more of bragging rights to even have him on the
payroll, as far as I understand from the old movie books I've read.)
Also, I must say
how odd it is to see a story about MGM in the 1930s feature a rip-off of Casablanca
as the big movie they're making. That was Warner Bros., not MGM, and it was
made during a war Thalberg never even lived to see (World War II). They not
only got the studio wrong, they even got the decade wrong too. Not to mention
that F. Scott Fitzgerald didn’t live to see American involvement in WWII, nor
did he live to see Casablanca either, as he died a couple of years prior
to its release, and I don’t believe he ever worked at Warner Bros., either. And
the star of the movie, Jeanne Moreau, was like 30 years too old to be a
believable Golden Age ingenue. (Not trying to be sexist or ageist, only
accurate: actresses were put out to pasture in their 20s much of the time in
those days, and only character roles were available for older women, unless
they were mega-stars. Remember, MGM even dropped Joan Crawford’s contract
because they thought she was getting a bit too long in the tooth, whereupon she
moved to Warner Bros., where she had a huge career resurgence with hits like Mildred
Pierce; but if she hadn’t already been a big star, her career would have
been over, especially in the 1930s, when Irving Thalberg reigned supreme.)
But the problem
with the movie of The Last Tycoon is also the problem with all the movie
versions of The Great Gatsby: The movies are made from a bare-bones
version of the plot, and in a Fitzgerald novel, the plot is almost incidental
to what the book is offering. The stars are the prose and the themes, and the
plot is merely a mannequin upon which to hang many beautiful and resonant
things. But in the movie version, we just get a cut-rate version of the naked
mannequin, so it doesn't really work as well as it should.
I don't think
there is such a thing as an "unfilmable" novel. Some lend themselves
less to movie adaptation due to their content or structure, but you can use
voiceovers, animation in a thought bubble, flashbacks, and all kinds of things to
show us what the writing is really doing; and it could be a TV mini-series if
it's too long to be a movie. But nobody has ever done justice to Fitzgerald on
film, that's for sure; and I think it's because they're only trying to film the
plot, which is, I believe, not even the star of the show in his books.
But there is a
saving grace for this movie, and it’s a captivating performance by Theresa
Russell, playing the LB Mayer stand-in’s daughter. It could have been a
thankless role, but she not only pulled it off with aplomb, she stole the
movie. And, if you watch her, she looks and carries herself so much like
current starlet Natalie Dormer. Russell even has a scene where she makes a
sideways smile to one side in the same way we’ve grown accustomed to seeing it
from Dormer, and which has become her trademark. (I have to wonder if someone
didn’t point out to Natalie Dormer how much she looked like a young Theresa
Russell, and if she watched her early movies to learn her craft.)
BTW: There is a
scene in the movie where the studio brass is watching a cut of a film, and the
editor dies during the screening. I thought maybe the editor should come back
to life as a zombie to feast upon the flesh of the living, and he could eat all
the other tycoons, and then, once the Thalberg character is the last tycoon, he
could eat Robert de Niro, and then the movie’s title would finally make some
kind of sense, which it really doesn’t when you think about it, as there were
plenty of other tycoons, and there have been plenty since. Maybe he meant the
last movie mogul, but that wasn’t true either. I think Fitzgerald was trying to
indicate that it was the end of an era when this character met his downfall,
but the title is a bit clumsy. But titles were not Fitzgerald’s strength, as we
know, and he never even settled on one until after his novels were finished;
and as we also know, The Love of the Last Tycoon was never finished; at
least not by FSG. And that character’s name: Monroe Stahr? And a director named
Red Ridingwood? Puh-leeze!
You should look
on Wikipedia to see the titles F. Scottie wanted to use for The Great Gatsby,
if you’re not familiar with them. They were all lame, and the book might have
flopped had he chosen wrongly. Sadly, the expression: "Don't judge a book
by its cover" only exists because it's human nature to do just that
without even thinking about it.
* That was the
slogan for Perdue Chicken ads, referring to Frank Perdue, the owner: “It takes
a tough man to make a tender chicken.”
