Word: stahr
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...thick, solitary splendor of the movie studio, Monroe Stahr weaves dreams. He watches images flicker by in the screening room, demands improvement. Amendments, modifications, excisions-all flow in the sharp, regular rhythm of a master musician keeping time by snapping his fingers. "The last scene was too gory-cut out one roll of the table," or, "Reshoot the whole scene." His taste is peerless, but it would have to be. The production chief of a major studio like MGM in the early '30s, Stahr holds absolute authority...
...Stahr cannot credit, either, the fact that there are some people who might decline to share his dreams of patchwork celluloid. Kathleen Moore, a girl Stahr sees as his own perfect romantic vision, a shade of his dead wife, does not even go to the movies. "Why not?" Stahr asks her, seriously puzzled. "Millions of people do. Movies give them what they need." Kathleen contradicts him. "What you need...
...Last Tycoon is a reasonably scrupulous adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished tragedy about the strange refractions of Monroe Stahr's life. It makes for a flawed, divided movie, sometimes full of cool, funny insight, sometimes crippled by the flyaway myths of movietown...
Unwearied Egos. The film shares roughly the strengths and weaknesses of the novel. Perceptions about the giddy excesses and malformed ironies of the movie business come through strongest: the unweaned egos of the people who make movies, the pushcart buccaneering of the studio heads who subsidize them. Monroe Stahr (Robert De Niro) belongs to both worlds. If movies are dreams for him, they are yard goods for his studio colleagues. Stahr insists on making a big-budget quality movie that may never turn a profit. He does it over the protests of the corporate lawyer, Fleishacker (Ray Milland), and Studio...
...movie also contains Director Elia Kazan's most assured work in a decade. Scenes like Kathleen's first appearance-Stahr sees her on a set, in the aftermath of an earthquake, floating down a man-made river aboard the great plaster head of a mythological goddess-are brought off with the checked flamboyance characteristic of the best in Panic in the Streets and East of Eden. Kazan has certainly lost none of his assurance with actors. De Niro makes an appropriately remote Stahr, bright or shaded depending on the circumstances and angle of view. Mitchum, Milland, Tony Curtis...