The Last Tycoon (1976 Elia Kazan)

What a frustrating film. It should have been so good, but it quite badly fails, overall.

Here's what's so good about it. Well, firstly, it's a 1970s Paramount film, which is usually a really good sign. (Interestingly it wasn't produced by Bob Evans, but by legendary shit - see here - Sam Spiegel, and that might be part of the problem.)  It has an amazing cast: Robert de Niro (who was particularly good in that decade), Robert Mitchum, Ray Milland, Jeanne Moreau, Tony Curtis, Theresa Russell, Donald Pleasance, Dana Andrews, Jack Nicholson, John Carradine. (And Seymour Cassel, Angelica Huston.) The production designer Gene Callahan recreates 1930s Hollywood well, and it's beautifully shot by Victor Kemper and edited by Richard Marks.

The story / screenplay. Well, the source is F Scott Fitzgerald and the adaptation is by Harold Pinter, which you would think is a good combination. And indeed, some of the dialogue is noticeably Pinteresque - just not enough so. The story in essence is a harassed Selznick-type film producer falls for a woman he sees, who's very equivocal about his attentions, but eventually sleeps with him; but she's already engaged to be married, and does so, leaving him high and dry. Meanwhile he rejects the (too young) girl who really loves him, whilst neglecting what's going on at work. It's the story of failure, then.

One of the problems is the playing of this woman by Ingrid Boulting, who's so anaemic that she sucks the life out of every scene she's in, especially those set in the producer's unfinished house by the sea - every time we go there, the film comes grinding to a halt (the first 45 minutes is by far the best). It also has a really badly fluffed ending, with de Niro repeating a film story idea he'd had earlier, directly to camera, cross cut against the now married woman, and him walking around deserted film sets - this does not work at all. In fact by the end of the film you're just glad it's finished.

Kazan had to spend a lot of time with Methody de Niro, telling him at one point to 'always be thinking of something other than the lines you're speaking'. Mitchum apparently commented 'Hell, I've been doing that for years!' Another problem was that Kazan wasn't allowed to change a word of Pinter's script without long transatlantic calls to England, and ultimately it's the script that sinks it. 

Q had watched Jafar Panahi's Three Faces earlier and found there was simply no contest - the stark, simple, naturalistic Iranian film won hands down over the inflated, misfiring Hollywood cow.

Mitchum was good at relaxing young Russell, at one point helping her with a surprised reaction shot by showing her his arse - her response is the one we see in the finished film.