Word: tycoons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Avers Real Estate Tycoon Byers: "I could lose my millions tomorrow and I wouldn't care, because I could make it all back in six months. I do just what failures are afraid to do." Coal King Burford puts the probability theory another way: "Failure does not count. If you accept this, you'll be successful. It's what I call the Ty Cobb theory of success. In the same year that Cobb set the record for the number of bases stolen, he also had a lot of failures. There were ten or twelve...
Stahr is not simply another Jay Gatsby. Fitzgerald was far older when he wrote The Last Tycoon, and the romantic fervor which defined Gatsby has been replaced in Stahr by a "mixture of common sense, wise sensibility, theatrical ingenuity, and a certain half-naive conception of the common weal." A paternalistic employer of the old school, Stahr, like his literary forerunner, is condemned to repeat the past in an age which values only the present moment. In contrast to Gatsby, however, his nemesis is not the carelessness of the very rich but the more modern venality of American capitalism...
...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...
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...