Movie · 1976 · Drama, Romance · 2h 3m · PG · English
Curator score: 2.4/10 (17.5K ratings)
He has the power to make anyone's dream come true... except his own.
Overview
Monroe Stahr, a successful movie producer, pursues a beautiful and elusive young woman — all the while working himself to death.
Ratings
Curator score: 2.4/10
IMDb: 6.2/10
Letterboxd: 3.16/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 33%
Metacritic: 57
TMDB: 6.3/10
Director
Elia Kazan
Production
Academy Pictures Corporation, Paramount Pictures
Cast
Robert De Niro, Tony Curtis, Robert Mitchum, Jeanne Moreau, Jack Nicholson, Donald Pleasence, Ray Milland, Dana Andrews, Ingrid Boulting, Peter Strauss, Theresa Russell, Tige Andrews, Morgan Farley, John Carradine, Jeff Corey, Diane Shalet, Seymour Cassel, Anjelica Huston, Bonnie Bartlett, Sharon Masters
Curator Review
Verdict
A lush, star-studded Hollywood melodrama with real atmosphere and a strong central performance, but it’s also famously slow, emotionally distant, and more interesting as a mood piece than as a fully satisfying drama. If you like prestige 1970s filmmaking, unfinished Fitzgerald material, or watching major actors orbit a doomed producer, there’s enough here to admire.
Best for
fans of 1970s studio-era melancholy
viewers who enjoy behind-the-scenes Hollywood stories
admirers of Robert De Niro in restrained, inward roles
people drawn to literary adaptations with a tragic, unfinished quality
Skip if
you want a tightly plotted romance
you’re impatient with slow, talky prestige dramas
you need strong emotional payoff
you dislike movies that feel more atmospheric than dramatic
Overview
The Last Tycoon is one of those films that feels bigger on paper than in the room. Fitzgerald’s unfinished Hollywood novel, Harold Pinter’s screenplay, Elia Kazan behind the camera, and a cast loaded with heavyweights should add up to a major event. Instead, the film moves with a heavy, mournful drift, often more fascinated by the sadness of power and desire than by narrative momentum.
Worth noting
That said, the movie has a genuine pull. Robert De Niro gives Monroe Stahr a haunted intensity, and the film’s best scenes capture the loneliness of a man who can shape dreams for everyone except himself. The Hollywood setting is rendered with a faded glamour that suits the material, and the supporting cast gives the whole thing a sense of old-world prestige, even when the drama feels undercooked.
Bottom line
As a romance, it’s elusive and frustrating; as a portrait of ambition, it’s more persuasive. The Last Tycoon is less a great film than a fascinating one: elegant, airless, and a little deadened, but still worth seeing if you’re interested in late-1970s studio filmmaking and the melancholy of unfinished lives.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Lauren (3★) · 171 likes
boring but robert de niro hot
theriverjordan (2★) · 163 likes
There’s a morose poetry that Elia Kazan should make his last film solely for money.
Following the release of “The Last Tycoon,” Kazan confessed that he made the bloated epic only as a cash grab. If ever there was proof needed that Kazan had abandoned his dabbling in communist ideals, “Tycoon” should suffice.
It is evidence both unwelcome and unnecessary, since Kazan had effectively spent most of his career post-1952 making various levels of both masterwork and mess justifying the… more
ray (3★) · 145 likes
no plot just 1970s robert de niro being hot and sexy
Jess (3★) · 109 likes
I’m building a time machine and going back to 1976, you know why
adi (2★) · 96 likes
this movie was so boring but I still wanna [redacted] young robert de niro's [redacted]