BEFORE: Robert De Niro carries over again from "1900" as De Niro Con marches on, and Bobby D will be my entry point into the Doc Block, which starts tomorrow. Yes, almost a month and a half of documentaries, enough to get me through June AND July and I'll have to figure out what to watch in August and September later, but there's plenty of time for that. Not really.
The original plan was to watch this BEFORE "1900", but by switching things around, I lined up another Birthday SHOUT-out - this time to Bonnie Bartlett, born June 20, 1929. Damn, and Donald Sutherland passed away today at the age of 88, just one day after I watched "1900". I'd hate to think I had anything to do with it.
THE PLOT: F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel is brought to life in this story of a movie producer slowly working himself to death.
AFTER: This kind of plays like a more downbeat version of "Babylon", another film where a man rises to the rank of producer in early Hollywood, then realizes it's not all it's cracked up to be. So this type of story has been around for a long time - but F. Scott Fitzgerald never finished this story, it seems in 1976 they were so desperate for another "Great Gatsby" that they raided his body of work and settled for second best. That being said, if Fitzgerald were still alive and somehow watched "Babylon", with all of its weird vomit scenes and elephant poop scenes, he'd probably kill himself.
It's believed that Monroe Stahr is a stand-in for the real-life producer Irving Thalberg, who was also a character in "Babylon". So at least we've reached the point where if someone wants to make a movie about the best movie producer of the 1930's, at least they can use his real name now. Progress? They later turned "The Last Tycoon" into a stage play in 1998 and an HBO miniseries that ran for one season in 2017, but got cancelled before they could make a second season. Seems about right.
Harold Pinter adapted Fitzgerald's novel into this 1976 film, and Elia Kazan directed it, this was his last film. That's a heavy credits llist for a movie that feels half-finished, and somehow they had to find an acceptable ending when Fitzgerald couldn't be bothered. But if you go back and look at the original book, the narrator is Cecilia Brady, daughter of Pat Brady, the head of the studio. There's a whole backstory where she's going to Bennington College and then flies back to Hollywood, and she's met at the airport by an author and a failed producer who are there to accompany her, only the plane has trouble and they have to land in Nashville, and they kill time by visiting the estate of President Andrew Jackson - all of that got cut out of the movie, go figure, but clearly they wanted the focus to be on De Niro's character, producer Monroe Stahr.
Anyway, that failed producer asks Cecilia to deliver a message to Stahr, then he commits suicide. OK, who wants his window seat on the plane? Cecilia has had a crush on Stahr for years, but he's always kept her at arm's length, probably because her father is the head of the movie studio and if he sleeps with her, he'll get fired. Anyway Stahr is still grieving over the death of his wife, who was an actress and they're still preserving her dressing room as a monument to her. But after a minor earthquake - because L.A. - a water pipe bursts on the set and Stahr sees two women clinging to a giant statue head as it floats out of a set, and one of the women reminds him of his late wife.
Here's where the book's focus shifts from Cecilia to Stahr, and the movie picks up with the giant floating statue head. Stahr pulls some strings and gets the phone number of the woman he saw on the statue head, and arranges a date - but it's the wrong woman. When he drops her off after the date, though, he sees her friend, and that's the woman who reminds him of his dead wife, so naturally he pursues her. But it's two dates before she'll even tell him her name (Kathleen Moore) or any personal details, then he drives her to the house he's having built on the beach in Santa Monica, and then they have sex. But then Stahr gets a letter from Kathleen, it turns out that she's been engaged to another man for a long time, and now she's decided to go ahead with the wedding. (Very similar to what happened to Finn in "Great Expectations"...)
Stahr is clearly upset, of course, and something breaks inside of him. He starts hanging out with Cecilia again, and she arranges a meeting with a labor leader (and suspected Communist) who wants to organize a labor union within the studio. It does not go well, Stahr gets drunk and starts a fight and ends up with a black eye - and though this brings him closer to Cecilia, it's all the excuse that her father needs to blackmail him into taking a "long vacation". He did, of course, have an affair with an engaged woman - think of the scandal! I presume this is the point where F. Scott Fitzgerald stopped writing, because the movie and the book (completed in 1993 by a Fitzgerald scholar) take different story paths.
In the movie, Stahr has a vision of Kathleen playing out a scenario that he had pitched to a writer - something about emptying her purse and throwing her black gloves into the fire, it doesn't really make much sense. But in the 1993 now-finished novel, the studio head hires a hit-man to have Stahr killed, but Stahr survives the attempt and does the same, he hires a more professional killer to take out Brady, then leaves for New York City. He considers calling off the execution, but then he has to catch his plane, so the job is done, and Cecilia is left without her father or her lover. Bummer.
It's not just that this film feels kind of unfinished (because it is), but it also feels like nobody involved with it wanted to BE there. Not De Niro, not Monroe Stahr, not anybody. Come on, guys, you live in the dream factory, you make movies for a living, could you at least please TRY to enjoy it? I know this is set during the Great Depression, but that doesn't mean that simply everybody was depressed all the time. Then again, I help people make movies for a living and yeah, I get it, some days you're just dialing it in and going through the motions. If you're always afraid of getting fired or the studio going under, I guess I can see how that could wear down a guy.
Anyway, this movie with "Last" in the title now becomes the last fiction film I'll watch for a while, but I'm sticking with the Hollywood theme as I enter the Doc Bloc tomorrow. There were probably a thousand ways I could have gotten in to the Doc Bloc, but I worked out the one that puts the "right" film on July 4, and also gives me a lot of options for where to go when it's over. So I'm sticking with that.
Also starring Robert Mitchum (last seen in "Becoming Mike Nichols"), Tony Curtis (last seen in "De Palma"), Jack Nicholson (ditto), Jeanne Moreau (last seen in "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead"), Donald Pleasance (last seen in "The Eagle Has Landed"), Ray Milland (last seen in "Mr. Warmth - The Don Rickles Project"), Dana Andrews (last seen in "The Best Years of Our Lives"), Ingrid Boulting, Peter Strauss (last seen in "Operation Finale"), Theresa Russell (last heard in "Being Human"), Tige Andrews (last seen in "Mister Roberts"), Morgan Farley (last seen in "Macbeth" (1948)), John Carradine (last seen in "House of Dracula"), Jeff Corey (last seen in "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man"), Diane Shalet, Seymour Cassel (last seen in "It Could Happen to You"), Anjelica Huston (last seen in "When in Rome"), Bonnie Bartlett (last seen in "Salem's Lot"), Sharon Masters, Eric Christmas (last seen in 'Harold and Maude"), Leslie Curtis, Lloyd Kino (last seen in "Midway" (1976)), Rutanya Alda (last seen in "The War with Grandpa"), Pamela Guest.
RATING: 4 out of 10 framed photos of Cecilia (on her own wall? what a narcissist...)
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