Word: stahr
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...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...
...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...
...ending, or else use the fragmentary notes Fitzgerald left about the rest of his novel to flesh out its contours. He opted for the first, and more obvious, route. The result is an abrupt ending which telescopes events designed to occur months or years apart--Kathleen's departure and Stahr's loss of power--into a period of a few filmed minutes. The effect is more sudden than powerful, since any necessary connection between the two crises, a connection which Fitzgerald's notes hint at, is never even suggested in the movie. The film merely ends in a crush...
Kazan is unable to overlay Fitzgerald's materials with any subtlety or discipline of his own. When in doubt, he resorts to all the tried-and-true cinematic devices--the soft filters, the pastel tints--to create romantic mood. At the screenwriters' ball, Stahr watches his love through the mist of a water fountain; when they walk and talk together, she is dressed in lavender and ruffles, and the scaffolding of his house-to-be is bathed in purple light...