Despite the gathering of Elia Kazan, Sam Spiegel, Harold Pinter, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Robert De Niro, The Last Tycoon is a flawed film. One reason for that, I fear, is the dopey love story to which Fitzgerald was attached, and which is weighed down on screen by painful miscasting. But I show it nonetheless because Fitzgerald's novel is an uncanny prediction of the recurring war in Hollywood-between factory product and the chance of a movie that could move the whole world. Long before most people understood such things, The Last Tycoon saw Hollywood as a crucial cultural battleground for America, a place where different ideas were fighting for life. If you doubt that, think of the scene where the hero meets a black man on the beach who tells him “You don't make pictures for me”-and then wonder how many of the Bush majority still go to the movies (apart from The Passion of the Christ).