F. Scott Fitzgerald At The Movies-Almost-The Last Tycoon

Book Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1941

I suppose that it is just a matter of taste, or maybe just being a cranky literary guy of sorts, but publishing a well-known author’s last unfinished work, as here with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon seems rather sacrilegious or perhaps just publisher’s greed to play off one last time on an author’s fame. I have no problem with, say, a publisher publishing a posthumous book like one did with Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast since that book had been  completed and moreover provided a great snapshot into the American self-imposed literary exile community, including some interesting insights into Fitzgerald as well, of post-World War I Paris. Those included more than one needed to know about Hemingway’s culinary interests as he crisscrossed France in open car and on foot, his of Gertrude Stein’s lesbianism and Fitzgerald’s worries about his manhood to be delicate about the matter.    

The subject here, the partially told saga of the last of the self-made maverick movie producers, is hardly definitive, or as compellingly told about the corporatization of that profit-filled medium. Moreover the pieces here add nothing to Fitzgerald’s reputation which will always hinge on the novel, The Great Gatsby, perhaps the best evocation of the modern age as it came steaming out of World War I when every grafter, con man and hustler had a field day trying to figure out his or her place in the Jazz Age before the hammer came down on everybody between the Great Depression and the “night of the long knives” in Europe. Grasps in an extraordinary way the particular “taming of America” in ways that previous generations would have had trouble understanding and beautifully evoked the loss of wonder that subsequent generations have not been able to regain in the fight to return to some Edenic age of innocence when wonder drove the new world. Perhaps he will be remembered as well for Tender Is The Night the hard drama of his flamed out love of Zelda as she went over the edge, and a slew of his short stories from the quasi-innocent Basil and Josephine stories to the endless run of salable items to titter the readers of the Saturday Evening Post when that meant something out in white picket fence America.             

That said, that off my chest I will say that Fitzgerald who did do work as a screenwriter, although it is not clear how successfully, has a pretty good idea of what was going on in Hollywood once the “talkies” came in and forced the story line and dialogue of a film to ratchet up several notches from the pantomime, the placards and organ musical interludes which drove the silent movies. And then there is the skewed economic question of putting what looks like a good idea on the screen with many times temperamental actors and inadequate financial backing. In any case the movie producer here, Monroe Stahr, is foredoomed to be the last of the independent filmmakers not only by the new system coming in place in Hollywood as the old-timers die off or have run out of steam by the fact that despite his “boy wonder” status for producing mostly hits and getting the most out of his employees come hell or high water he is headed for an early grave due to rough living and a weak heart.

The story, his story as far as it goes, is told by the daughter of one of his associates who is young enough, to be unworldly enough, sheltered enough as a college student at Bennington when college was for the rich and prosperous or the “from hunger” New York City immigrant children who roamed City College, to be seriously in love with him although he is only, at best, tepid toward her. Reason, or rather reasons, Monroe is still in thrall to the memory of his late actress wife, and, is smitten by a woman he met randomly on his studio lot who preternaturally looks like his late wife.

That short tremulous love affair which ends in sorrow and departure is the human interest center of the story. Additionally there are scenes about how screenwriters write (or don’t), the importance of skilled cameramen in setting up shots and giving that glow so necessary to those old-time black and white productions, how stars were made (or unmade) in those day when actors were just short of indentured servants, and which gives an insight into the collective nature of the film industry no matter who produces, who directs, and who stars. That theme was done very well cinematically in the 1950s film, The Bad and the Beautiful about a post-World War II Monroe Stahr –like figure, a mad man director who scorched the earth of a natural born actress, a innovative budding director and an inventive sleepy town professor turned thoughtful screenwriter before he went belly up.

There is also an interesting scene, and some references sprinkled throughout the story, about the coming unionization of the industry, the fears that produced in the movie moguls, including Stahr, and a decidedly more morbid fear about the “reds” bringing revolution to their Hollywood front door in the 1930s which, perhaps, foreshadows the post-war  red scare Hollywood Ten blacklist night. But the thing is all tangled up at the end, left hanging and so rightly should have stayed on the shelf in manuscript form. Enough said.