Word: stahr
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1941-1941
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...foreword, Critic Wilson states his belief that The Last Tycoon is Fitzgerald's "most mature" work, that Hero Monroe Stahr was the most thoroughly explored of all Fitzgerald characters. Stahr was an executive and creative genius of motion pictures, a "boy wonder" at 22, later boss and three-quarters owner of a big studio. Under him the movies reached a sort of golden age. After him the industry grew too complicated for one man to keep his hand on everything in a studio. Stahr "had flown up very high to see, on strong wings, when he was young...
...night after an earthquake Stahr found a girl who was almost a replica of his dead wife, and they were shortly having an atmospheric affair. Chafing against a hard edge of reluctance she felt in Stahr, the girl married another man. Stahr, no drinker, got dismally drunk. Fitzgerald's manuscript stops at that point. The synopsis, and notes carry the tale down to Stahr's death in an airplane crash, and its curious aftermath...
...Monroe Stahr was the last Hollywood tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald was the last U.S. romantic. To the end his writing was preoccupied with flowers, perfume, rain, the rustle of women's clothes, warm darkness and music in the night. He sometimes deliberately blurred his narrative line, resulting now in effective suspense, now in mere teasing. Yet this fragment contains scenes of beauty and power. Completed, it might or might not have been a Citizen Kane about the movie industry...