“I’ll tell you three things. All writers are children. 50% of them are drunks. And up until very recently writers in Hollywood were gag men…most of them still are gag men but we call them writers.”
Elia Kazan‘s The Last Tycoon is an adaptation of an unfinished F. Scott Fitzgerald novel about MGM production chief Irving Thalberg. Thalberg is called Monroe Stahr in the film, and is played by Robert DeNiro in an extremely irritating fashion.
It was DeNiro’s annoyingly boorish performance that persuaded me to never see Kazan’s film a second time. (I caught it once in late November of ’76.) I’d always read that Thalberg was quite the MGM wunderkind, the power behind the throne — a blend of class and willfulness and concentrated drillbit smarts that everyone admired.
The Last Tycoon runs 123 minutes, and there were very few scenes when I wasn’t muttering to myself, “God, what an asshole.” Not to mention that idiot grin of DeNiro’s. 15 minutes into the film I was wondering why Kazan, one of the greatest-ever directors and a guy who could really see into actors and calculate what they were capable of bringing to a role…why did Kazan cast the dorky DeNiro, unless the idea was to undermine the Thalberg legend? A very perverse film, and the two scenes below reminded me of that.