Reviews

Kazan and Pinter's THE LAST TYCOON is disjointed, uneven, and strangely memorable -- rather like an oddly unsettling, hazily recalled dream.

Robert De Niro, in a quietly amazing performance, disappears into the title character of Monroe Stahr, a workaholic Hollywood producer who is, in Keats's phrase, "half in love with easeful death." (This understated movie is from the same year as De Niro's flashy bravura turn in Martin Scorsese's TAXI DRIVER.)

Most of the supporting cast is excellent, including Robert Mitchum and Ray Milland as a couple of Shakespearean-knavish villains, Jack Nicholson, Donald Pleasence, Theresa Russell, and Dana Andrews.

Ingrid Boulting is beautiful but somewhat less satisfactory as Stahr's love interest, Kathleen Moore. In fairness, however, her role is deliberately written as something of an enigma: Kathleen Moore is a blank movie screen onto which Stahr, a near-solipsist, projects fantasies and memories of his deceased wife.

The various elements of THE LAST TYCOON never quite cohere into a whole, but several scenes have stuck in my memory ever since I first saw it years ago. Among them:

• Stahr's mock-lecture to the misfit screenwriter Boxley (Donald Pleasence), beginning: "You've been fighting duels all day..."

• Kathleen Moore telling Stahr, over the insistent crash of the surf at his unfinished ocean-front mansion, "I want ... a quiet life"

• Stahr's informal evening meeting with a labor-union organizer (Jack Nicholson), during which the privately despondent movie producer grows increasingly drunk and belligerent; and ...

• The closing ten minutes or so of the film, which take on an almost surreal quality: Disembodied lines of dialogue from earlier scenes recur; Stahr repeats his earlier speech to Boxley, only now as a soliloquy addressed directly to the camera; and then -- murmuring "I don't want to lose you" -- he seems to hallucinate a vision of Kathleen as she moves on to a new life without him.

Only Jeanne Moreau and Tony Curtis struck me as jarringly miscast in their parts. They -- and their comic-pathetic scenes as insecure movie idols -- seemed to belong to another movie entirely.

THE LAST TYCOON is an uneven work but most assuredly has its merits.

The film "Gods and Generals" is essentially a biographical film about General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson of the CSA. Those who have no idea, or interest, as to who this man was should probably stick to such heavyweight box-office competition such as "Agent Cody Banks," "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days," or "Daredevil" instead. "Gods and Generals" is well-made, old-fashioned film that gives an absorbing view of the U.S. Civil War and one of its leading figures. The portrait of Jackson is accurate from the big issues (his profound religious faith) down to the trivial (his fondness for lemonade). Characters both Northern and Southern are portrayed even-handedly, and the historical and social aspects of the film are authentic. Characters quote poetry from memory and sometimes speak in almost biblical cadences, in the same way that Lincoln's speeches were deeply influenced by the language of the King James Bible. It is a beautiful film to look at, with great feeling for the often-wild landscape of the era; in this respect, it gains immeasurably from being seen on a full-scale theatrical screen. Two criticisms of the movie have been made repeatedly: (1) it's "too long"; and (2) it doesn't accurately portray the horrors of war. On the first score -- too long for what? It is the right length for its subject matter. It's the right length to give an earnest and thoughtful account of a great general's life and a turning point in American history, even world history. (Many believe the Civil War might have gone differently had Jackson survived.) It IS too long if you have Attention Deficit Disorder or have been raised upon television sitcoms and the constant jump-cuts & meritricious visual razzle-dazzle of TV commercials and music videos. On the second score -- no one will ever walk away from this film eager to see war in real life. Men line up with their rifles (in a mode of combat no longer practiced), blast away at each other nearly face-to-face, and drop en masse like bags of bloody meat. In one memorable scene, Col. Chamberlain [Jeff Daniels] sleeps on the nighttime battlefield using his fellow soldiers' corpses as bedding; come daylight, he uses those same corpses to absorb flying enemy bullets once the battle resumes anew. Apparently what some critics actually desire are cool special effects, with exploding bodies and mangled limbs flying across the screen. "Gods and Generals" is a movie of great integrity and power -- one made by adults for adults.