Word: pinter
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...faults of The 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...
...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...
...virtues of Fitzgerald's portrait of Stahr find their way into the filmed version, so do all the flaws of the rest of his book. One major problem is the treatment of Kathleen, Stahr's lover. Pinter and Kazan apparently took their cues from a line in the novel in which Stahr refers to Kathleen as a "Beautiful Doll." Ingrid Boulting is precisely that--a porcelain figure, heavily made-up and beautiful to look at, but seemingly ready to break at a touch. There is no real sensuality in her, none of the flesh-and-blood passion Fitzgerald probably means...
...Homecoming of Harold Pinter. Laughs and mystery at the Lyric Stage, 54 Charles St., Beacon Hill, Boston. Showing Fridays and Saturdays at 8 and Sunday matinees at 3. For info call...
...LAND. Harold Pinter, the sphinx of modern drama, will not yield up his mystery, but Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud bountifully divulge a half-century apiece of the secrets of great acting...