Word: stahr
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Audubon Society President Elvis J. Stahr. With the figures the volunteers provide, ornithologists are able not only to check the health and vigor of different avian species but also to detect changes in their habitats, set up wildlife sanctuaries and even help airlines reroute their planes to avoid dangerous collisions with migrating birds. The bird count also acts as an environmental early-warning system. Recalling the canaries that miners took with them into coal mines to detect noxious fumes, Stahr explains that birds are usually quicker than man to react to changes about them. One example: the decline of many...
...drawn face of Powell recalled that of Monroe Stahr, the Hollywood producer in The Last Tycoon (played by Robert De Niro in the movie) who presided over a cosmos of exploding egos in order to produce celluloid fantasies. Powell was beset by a nervous President, a clamorous diplomatic gallery, shouting reporters, Israelis, Arabs and the usual indignities of just being in Gotham...
DESPITE ITS FAILINGS, one thing The Last Tycoon as a movie manages to do that the book cannot is to actualize the metaphoric connection between cinematic illusion and real life romance. As a producer, Stahr feeds a dream-starved audience "movie movies," where the hero is brave, the heroine is crystalline pure and the romance is sustained right through the end. Coaching an overly literary writer, Stahr at one point dramatizes a scene from an imaginary film to demonstrate the art of film-making. "What happens?" the writer asks, when Stahr stops short of the finish. "I don't know...
...ending of The Last Tycoon finds Stahr alone in his office, after being rebuffed by both Kathleen and his fellow studio heads. Voices from the past besiege him. All at once, in the only completely non-realistic sequence in the movie, he begins to reenact the story he told his writer, about a woman stealthily burning a pair of black gloves. The camera cuts to Kathleen, now stealthily burning Stahr's last letter to her. Her husband enters, and she kisses him; but when her tear-stained face glances up, it is Stahr she is looking at. Another cut later...
...point is clear: Stahr has tried to impose the structure of movie romance on an unromantic reality. His mission has been that of the artist, to bring order out of the chaos of everyday life. Kazan and Pinter have similarly attempted to give cinematic order to Fitzgerald's muddled work. If their mission has not been a complete success, their failure, like Stahr's, has at least provided the pleasure of romantic illusion along...