Word: tycoons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...advent of Murdoch, publishing tycoon on three continents, is of more than parochial New York City interest: he gave promise, with his money and his maverick irreverence, of brightening up the increasingly sedate American newspaper scene. The trend is all the other way: newspapers in monopoly cities being sold for huge sums to absentee conglomerates. Unless a local editor with courage and energy insists otherwise, the natural commercial impulse is to put out complacent, unenterprising papers that don't embarrass the local powers that be and make no waves. So far Murdoch, a fellow refreshingly free of cultural pretensions...
...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...
Smitten Fascination. All these virtues can make The Last Tycoon a pleasure. They do not make it a success. Kazan and Pinter go smarmy in the romantic episodes, where Fitzgerald struggled for-and found-a saving, tough-minded detachment. Here, Kathleen is rendered with the same smitten fascination that overcame Stahr. She is played by Newcomer Ingrid Boulting (stepdaughter of British Producer Roy Boulting) with a sort of spacey spirituality that seems part Pre-Raphaelite, part post-psychedelic. Theresa Russell, who plays Brady's daughter, the proud possessor of a crush on Stahr, is around more than her role...
...crucial, finally crushing problem with The Last Tycoon, however, is that it half credits some of the most insubstantial legends of Hollywood. The movie does improve Fitzgerald's convoluted plans for ending the novel, which required a murder and a plane crash. Here, Stahr is swallowed up in the looming darkness of a sound stage. It is a lovely, but treacherously romantic image. In effect, Kazan and Pinter turn their own movie into another part of Stahr's dream. The movie is about the sad solitude that power brings, the high price of genius. These are shallow, narcissistic...
...glimpses a man stuffing what turns out to be the body of a murdered girl into a trash can. Though the view is only in silhouette, Bone has enough of a sense of the man to gasp "It's him!" when later he sees a newspaper photo of Tycoon J.J. Wolfe, a cornpone millionaire from the Ozarks. Such a flash of recognition would, of course, never persuade any court of Wolfe's guilt. But Bone's pal Cutter is convinced-perhaps because he associates the Wolfe type with those who sent him to Viet Nam. He devises...