The Last Tycoon (1976)

(Hollywood, California; early-to-mid 1930’s)
IMDb

Elia Kazan’s last film is an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished final novel, which itself was inspired by the short but eventful life of MGM production head Irving Thalburg. Robert De Niro is Monroe Stahr, a man who in a short 35 years of life rose from a New York Street kid to running a major Hollywood studio, International World Films. Always ambitious, he had become even more enveloped in his work after the death of his wife, a successful actress. One night on the studio lot Stahr spy’s a beautiful young women who reminds him of his late wife (Ingrid Boulting), instantly smitten he expends his resources on a search for the young women, whom he discovers to have ambitions only for a quite life.

The basic arc is classic Fitzgerald, a powerful man who is not happy because he can not have the women he loves, but playwright Harold Pinter, who composed the script, chooses to also explore the unfinished nature of story, like that F. Scott’s novel, or Thalburg’s life. The ending is thus left ambiguous, if leading. Despite some real thought in the writing, and an excellent cast, which includes the fun bonus of having former studio system actors play aging IWF employees, such as (John Carradine as a studio tour guide), relatively little happens in the film, and what does reminds one of superior De Niro movies such as Once Upon a Time in America and The Godfather Part II. Non-the-less a neat curio on several levels, including one of the better looking movies within a movie (Highway to Tomorrow) that I can recall. Also De Niro and Nicholson play ping-pong, no really.