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The Last Tycoon on DVD

The Last Tycoon on DVD

Well, there’s two hours we’ll never get back.

It’s a shame, too. We’d never seen this movie before, but when we saw the names Elia Kazan coupled with Robert De Niro, Robert Mitchum, Harold Pinter, Ray Milland, Tony Curtis, Jeanne Moreau, Jack Nicholson, Donald Pleasence and Sam Spiegel, we figured we couldn’t lose.

We were wrong.

The Last Tycoon was the great Kazan’s last film and, alas, he went out not with a bang but with a whimper. This is one tedious movie (in fact, it has enough tedium for two movies) that seems far longer than its 123 minutes.

All is not bad, however. De Niro is excellent as Monroe Stahr, a wunderkind Hollywood movie producer of the 1930’s supposedly based on Irving Thalberg. De Niro is driven, yet human, and haunted by a lost love he thinks he finds anew in a lookalike who proceeds to screw up his life royally.

The movie basically amounts to a soap opera in which Stahr’s increasing obsession with the girl (Ingrid Boulting) affects the rest of his life and his work and ends up with his being given the boot - at least temporarily - by the studio brass (which includes Mitchum and Milland).

Everything is indeed in place for this to be a terrific movie. The all-star cast, not surprisingly, is excellent, and the production values of this period piece are top notch. But something’s missing. We never felt involved, drawn into the movie and never really cared that much for the characters - though we must admit that we rooted for De Niro’s character and hoped he’d end up getting the girl.

Alas, there’s no Hollywood ending here (well…) and this sterile piece of filmmaking ended up causing us to be checking our watches repeatedly, wondering just how a movie with such potential could leave us so cold.

The film was based on an unfinished novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald and is supposed to be an engrossing tale of studio politics. And all but the engrossing part is there.

The DVD is pretty good, though sparse. Paramount has given it a nice anamorphic widescreen (16x9 TV compatible) treatment and the picture quality is for the most part very good. The image is sharp, the colors are deep and rich and though there’s some grain in evidence at times, overall it’s a pleasant task for the eyes to watch this DVD.

Audio is offered in two versions: restored mono (or “momo” as it says on the box) and Dolby Digital 5.1. The latter doesn’t really have any surround, but it does spread the musical instruments across the front channels and is overall a more pleasant version of the soundtrack. Audio quality is good, not great, but there’s nothing really wrong with it other than the odd bit of distortion.

There are no extras, alas. It would have been nice to see some “making of” or other background info that could have explained how a movie with such potential fell so short of it. But what can you do?

The Last Tycoon, from Paramount Home Video
123 min. anamorphic widescreen (1.85:1, 16x9 TV compatible) Dolby Digital 5.1 surround and restored mono
Starring Robert De Niro, Tony Curtis, Robert Mitchum, Jeanne Moreau, Jack Nicholson, Donald Pleasence, Ray Milland, Dana Andrews,
Produced by Sam Spiegel
Written by Harold Pinter, Directed by Elia Kazan

 

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