Word: cecilia
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...Last Tycoon as a movie are mainly those of the book, to which screenwriter Harold Pinter has, on the whole, been faithful. What Fitzgerald left us when he died was only a fragment of a novel, a draft of a story still halfway from completion. Fitzgerald's narrator is Cecilia Brady, the daughter of Stahr's business partner, who views Hollywood "with the resignation of a ghost assigned to a haunted house." It is through Cecilia, whose gaze is at first glazed by infatuation and later embittered by cynicism, that we meet and experience Monroe Stahr. In a series...
...film, even more than the novel, Stahr emerges as the only fully realized character amid a sea of Hollywood types. While retaining much of the original dialogue, Pinter and director Elia Kazan have dispensed with the device of Cecilia as narrator; instead, we see Stahr head-on, dominating the film in the same way that he dominates everyone around him. The extent of his control is partly a function of the script, but it is enhanced immeasurably by Robert DeNiro's charismatic performance. DeNiro is brilliant in the role, evoking alternately the shrewd competence and romantic vulnerability which together make...
Other characters are too sketchily conceived to be very convincing. Cecilia (Theresa Russell) turns into a snotty, would-be vamp, almost a figure of self-parody. Robert Mitchum, as her father, spends most of his time looking constipated. Jack Nicholson delivers a fine vignette of a labor organizer encroaching on Stahr's prerogatives, but his appearance is unfortunately brief...
...M.P.s assemble, they appear to be pillars of rectitude. Their clerk is another matter. Maddie Gotobed (Cecilia Hart) has the body of a Botticelli. She is slow at speed writing but has fast friends in high places. Some are right here in the committee chamber. As Maddie's blue scanties emerge from the M.P.s' briefcases at inauspicious moments and whip through the air like naval pennants, it is clear that whatever the Prime Minister's electoral problems may be, Maddie has carried the House...
...white, the brisk notation of the face smeared and flecked by the black lace veil, the emphatic circumflex of the painted fan behind the girl's head-essentially different from that of Degas, Cassatt's mentor? Stylishness does not go by gender; perhaps it never did. Cecilia Beaux's Sita and Sarita (1921) looks "feminine" when you know that it is the work of a once very popular American female portraitist, a gifted conservative with a relaxed, unemphatic and slightly languid style-but not until then. And with more abstract art, division by gender becomes meaningless. What...