The Films of Warren Beatty: The Fortune, starring Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, and Stockard Channing, directed by Mike Nichols (1975)

Blu-Ray cover for the 2014 release of The Fortune.

Publicity still for The Fortune, with Jack Nicholson and his ridiculous hairdo, Stockard Channing, and Warren Beatty, with his slicked back hair and Howard Hughes-like mustache.

A light moment from the set of The Fortune, with Jack Nicholson, Stockard Channing, and Warren Beatty.

Lobby card for The Fortune. While the print advertisements had Beatty's name before Nicholson's, and Nicholson's name higher than Beatty's, the credits at the beginning of the movie had Nicholson's name before Beatty's, and Beatty's name higher. I have no doubt that lawyers and agents worked for a long time to come up with that. A similar arrangement was made for the credits of The Towering Inferno, as both Steve McQueen and Paul Newman wanted top billing.

Did you know that in 1975, at the peak of their stardom, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson made a movie together? You probably didn’t, as the super-obscure movie The Fortune was not a hit at the time, and has languished in obscurity ever since then. It hadn’t been released on DVD until Twilight Time’s recent Blu-Ray edition came out in December, 2014. In addition to its two famous leading men, The Fortune also boasted a super-famous director, the great Mike Nichols. Unfortunately, none of these three movie legends could save The Fortune from being a very bad movie.

The Fortune is set in the late 1920’s, and what little plot there is centers around the Mann Act, a 1910 law meant to prevent prostitution by making it illegal to transport women over state lines for “immoral purposes.” The vague wording of the law meant that men could be prosecuted for bringing their girlfriends or mistresses across state lines. The Fortune’s super complicated plot has Stockard Channing running away from her husband to be with her lover Warren Beatty. However, because Beatty is already married, Channing marries Jack Nicholson, who is wanted for embezzlement and goes along with Beatty’s plan. Beatty poses as Channing’s brother to divert suspicion from him, since he’s violating the Mann Act. Although Channing is technically committing bigamy by marrying Nicholson, and isn’t Nicholson violating the Mann Act as well? The three characters go to Los Angeles, and tension mounts as the three share a bungalow. Eventually Beatty and Nicholson decide the best thing to do would be to murder Channing and split her large inheritance. 

Sounds like a laugh riot, right? The main problem with The Fortune is that the script is really bad. None of the characters are fleshed out for you to care about them. If we were engaged more with the characters, we might find it funnier when Beatty and Nicholson are trying to kill Channing. But in order for that to work, you have to want them to kill her for some reason. She either needs to be an extremely unlikable character, or you need to sympathize with their characters so you want them to succeed. But Channing’s character isn’t unlikeable. She’s kind of boring, but you certainly don’t want her to be killed. So the movie doesn’t really work, for reasons that could be grasped in Screenwriting 101. 

Beatty and Nicholson totally overplay their parts. I think they knew the script was crap, so they just cranked it up to 11. (Speaking of This Is Spinal Tap, look for Christopher Guest, who has a small role as “Boy Lover,” the guy who’s making out with his girlfriend in his car.) Beatty’s part is extremely difficult to play, as it’s just a one-note character who is constantly unhappy. He just yells and shouts at everyone. And you wonder, why did Stockard Channing fall in love with him? Why did he fall in love with her? The script certainly doesn’t give us a good answer. Stockard Channing does a fine job in her first starring role, but her part is underwritten.

Mike Nichols’ direction is probably the best part of the movie, as he uses long takes and some lovely tracking shots to enhance the artistry of The Fortune. Oddly enough, The Fortune feels very much like a stage play, even though it was an original screenplay by Carole Eastman, writing under the pseudonym “Adrien Joyce.” Eastman was a good friend of Jack Nicholson’s, and she wrote the screenplay for the classic Five Easy Pieces.

From what I’ve read about the production of The Fortune, it sounds like it was rushed into production before the script was finished. Columbia, the studio producing The Fortune, looked at the stars and the director and visions of dollar signs danced through their heads. Producer Don Devlin was someone who didn’t think the script was ready for filming. Devlin said, “None of them {Beatty, Nicholson, and Nichols} had studied the thing, and all of a sudden they were beginning to ask the questions that should have been asked six months or a year earlier.” (Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, by Peter Biskind, p.201) 

The Fortune started filming just after production on Beatty’s movie Shampoo had wrapped. Beatty had been trying to get Shampoo made for several years, and it was a much more personal project for him. Beatty wasn’t focused on The Fortune, as he admitted: “I didn’t read The Fortune until the day I showed up to work.” (Biskind, p.201) Beatty was later dismissive of the movie, saying to film critic Gene Shalit “I don’t even want to remember that picture!” (Warren Beatty: A Private Man, by Suzanne Finstad, p.429)

Mike Nichols later said that he had “a little tickle in the back of your mind that something isn’t quite right” during the making of The Fortune. (Finstad, p.424) Nichols and screenwriter Carole Eastman had a difficult relationship, and he couldn’t get her to write an ending to the screenplay. Nichols said, “The script was like 345 pages, and it had no ending nor did it ever get an ending from Carole. I had to carve a story out of all those pages. Sort of like a butter sculpture at a wedding.” (Biskind, p.205)

While good friends Beatty and Nicholson got along very well during filming, Stockard Channing said that Beatty and Nicholson acted “like jerks.” (Biskind, p.206) Filming The Fortune was probably something of a baptism by fire for the young actress, as she had to play opposite two huge male stars.

The Fortune was not a hit when it was released in May of 1975, but ironically enough, 1975 would be a huge year for both Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, as Beatty’s hit Shampoo opened in February, and Nicholson’s iconic Oscar-winning performance in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was released in November. Columbia Pictures thought that The Fortune would beat Shampoo at the box office, but the opposite happened as Shampoo grossed $49 million to become the 5^th biggest movie at the box office in 1975, and The Fortune limped along to a gross of “under $12.5 million.” (Biskind, p.219) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was also a massive hit, grossing over $100 million on its way to becoming the 3^rd biggest hit of 1975, behind The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Jaws. 

As for how The Fortune fits into the career and Warren Beatty’s filmography, Beatty’s character Nicky is yet another one of his dreamers and schemers. Nicky is Clyde Barrow, but without any charm or smarts. Asking Warren Beatty to play a character without any charm is a waste of his talents as an actor. Beatty is a gifted comedian, but in The Fortune there’s little comedy to be had. The Fortune once again sees Beatty in a period piece, and of his 22 movies, 8 of them are period pieces. Beatty’s period movies are: Splendor in the Grass, Bonnie and Clyde, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Shampoo, The Fortune, Reds, Dick Tracy, and Bugsy. 

While reading about The Fortune, I came upon a great quote by the character actress Florence Stanley, who might have the funniest scenes in the film as the nosy landlady. Stanley had this to say about Warren Beatty: “When you talk to him, it’s like he doesn’t have anybody on his mind except you. There are certain people-and there are very few-that make the moment a moment. And when you’re with Warren, and you’re talking to him, that’s all there is. The connection is the magnetism, and his interest in you is so complete.” (Finstad, p. 498) I think that’s a very good assessment of the charm and charisma that made Warren Beatty such a successful actor.

Movie Review: The Last Tycoon, starring Robert De Niro, directed by Elia Kazan, based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1976)

Some of the cast of The Last Tycoon. From left to right: Tony Curtis, Leslie Curtis (Tony's real-life wife playing his movie wife), Ray Milland, Robert De Niro, Jeanne Moreau, Robert Mitchum, and Theresa Russell.

Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson size each other up in The Last Tycoon, 1976. This is before they play ping pong.

Robert De Niro, generating zero chemistry with co-star Ingrid Boulting in The Last Tycoon, 1976.

Director Elia Kazan’s last movie was his 1976 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel The Last Tycoon, starring Robert De Niro, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. The movie is proof that all the talent in the world can still produce a bad movie.

There are so many things wrong with The Last Tycoon that it’s hard to know where to start. Perhaps making a movie of an unfinished novel was not a good idea. I haven’t read Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, also known as The Love of the Last Tycoon, so I don’t know how faithful the movie is to his writing, but it sure feels like it was based on an unfinished novel. The Last Tycoon is set in Hollywood in the late 1930’s, and the titular character is Monroe Stahr, who is the head of a film studio. (Stahr was loosely based on real-life movie mogul Irving Thalberg.) The film follows him as he works on movies and seeks out a beautiful young woman who reminds him of his dead movie star wife. 

Unfortunately, Robert De Niro is miscast as Stahr. Monroe Stahr is a boring character, and it’s a disservice to cast one of the silver screen’s most exciting performers in that role. Stahr was too much of a blank slate for me to ever feel invested in his emotions. There’s no dramatic tension to the movie, and whatever lingering tension there was comes to a screeching halt during the way too long love scenes between De Niro and Ingrid Boulting, as the girl who reminds Stahr of his dead wife. The scenes between Boulting and De Niro are just not that interesting, and they don’t have any chemistry together. Theresa Russell plays the other main female character, and while Boulting and Russell are both very beautiful to look at, they are not very good actresses. On a positive note, I did love Stahr's beautiful red Packard convertible.

Kazan seemed determined to include every famous person he could find in the cast, which makes watching The Last Tycoon slightly more interesting. The supporting cast includes Tony Curtis, Robert Mitchum, Ray Milland, Dana Andrews, Jeanne Moreau, Donald Pleasence, John Carradine, Jeff Corey, Anjelica Huston, Peter Strauss, and, oh yeah, Jack Nicholson. Yes, Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro made a movie together in 1976. Unfortunately, it was this turkey.

I couldn’t figure out the tone that The Last Tycoon was going for. There are times when it seems to want to be a comedy. On their first date, Stahr takes Boulting’s character to see a trained seal at a restaurant. Am I supposed to laugh at De Niro’s interactions with the seal and his trainer? Is the scene where a movie editor dies during a screening supposed to be humorously ironic? I have no idea. I blame Harold Pinter for this. 

Another weird moment is when we see the movie-within-a-movie that Tony Curtis and Jeanne Moreau have been working on. It’s very obviously a pastiche of Casablanca, as Curtis plays the piano and bids Moreau adieu. She even sings part of the song he’s playing. It’s almost high camp, but not quite. I really think it’s supposed to be serious. Also, Casablanca wasn’t released until 1942, which is several years after the time period of The Last Tycoon. Curtis also has a scene where he confides to Stahr that he can’t get it up anymore, but he knows that Stahr will have a solution for his problem. I don’t remember what the hell Stahr tells him, but it works for Curtis. Of the random celebrity cameos, Robert Mitchum gets the most to do as another powerful producer at the studio. It is fun to watch Mitchum and De Niro together, as they both played the same role in the two different versions of Cape Fear. Hell, it’s always fun to watch Robert Mitchum. Ray Milland doesn’t have much to do other than hang out with Robert Mitchum and look like a more bald version of Jimmy Stewart. Dana Andrews has a couple of scenes as a beleaguered director whom Stahr releases from a movie. Despite his real-life battle with alcoholism, which he overcame in the late 1960’s, Andrews looks super handsome and not much different from his heyday as a leading man in the 1940’s. 

So, what about Jack Nicholson? Does he swoop in to save the movie from terminal boredom? Does he demand to order toast from the studio commissary? Isn’t it super exciting that The Last Tycoon pairs up two of the greatest actors of the 1970’s? Well, even the scenes between De Niro and Nicholson are dull. Their characters are adversaries, as Nicholson plays a Communist who wants to unionize the screenwriters at De Niro’s studio. Both Nicholson and De Niro seem to be operating at half-speed during their first scene together. It doesn’t help that the dialogue is super boring. And I don’t know if Nicholson is trying to do an accent or what-his character is from Tennessee-but he doesn’t have his usual Jack Nicholson vocal cadences. It’s terribly frustrating to watch two exciting, dynamic actors play boring people. In their other two scenes together De Niro totally overacts Stahr’s drunkenness, as he challenges Nicholson’s character to a game of ping pong. Yep, De Niro and Nicholson face off in a movie over a fucking game of ping pong. Opportunity wasted!

The last scene of The Last Tycoon, where De Niro/Stahr breaks the fourth wall and looks directly at the camera as he tells a story about watching a girl burn a pair of gloves-a story we’ve already heard once before in the movie-is a real “what the fuck?” moment. 

The Last Tycoon was an unfortunate waste of talent, and a sad ending to the great directing career of Elia Kazan.

The Films of Warren Beatty-"McCabe & Mrs. Miller," starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, Directed by Robert Altman (1971)

Warren Beatty and Julie Christie in "McCabe & Mrs. Miller."

Beatty and director Robert Altman in a lighter moment on the set.

Warren Beatty as McCabe.

Robert Altman’s 1971 western “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie in the title roles, is one of the director’s best-known movies. Largely unsuccessful when originally released, it has since gained a considerable critical following. Personally, I found it less than compelling, although there are impressive moments in the movie.

“McCabe & Mrs. Miller” is set in the late 1800’s or early 1900’s, and tells the story of John McCabe, (Beatty) a gambler who comes to the frontier town of Presbyterian Church and starts a brothel. Soon afterwards a professional madam, Mrs. Miller (Christie) comes to town and offers to run the brothel for McCabe. He agrees, and they become business partners. Eventually, McCabe falls in love with her. McCabe’s brothel becomes more and more successful, and a mining company wants to buy him out. McCabe refuses to sell, and does not heed the warning that he will be killed if he refuses to sell. Eventually gunmen come to the town to kill McCabe, and he battles them in a snowstorm, killing all of them, but not before being mortally wounded. McCabe then dies in a snowbank.

“McCabe & Mrs. Miller” is a dark, drab, and dreary movie. It’s definitely an “anti-western” movie, as Altman plays with and subverts many of the conventions of the genre. There’s nothing romantic about either of the lead characters, or the town they’re in. The unglamorous tone of the movie is probably closer to reality than most of the “classic” Hollywood westerns. One of my biggest problems with the movie is the almost inaudible sound mix. It’s extremely hard to understand what anyone is saying, especially at the beginning of the movie. I know that overlapping dialogue was one of Altman's trademarks as a director, but here it’s used very ineffectively. The sound makes it hard to get into the movie. It’s difficult to figure out what’s going on and who the characters are. When he first saw the movie, Beatty was very annoyed at the sound mix, saying, “The sound in the first couple of reels, in which one would ordinarily expect that the exposition would be laid down and had to be clear, was not clear. That sort of irritated me.” (“Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America,” by Peter Biskind, p. 163.) 

Beatty gives an excellent performance as McCabe. Beatty hides his handsomeness under a bushy beard, a giant fur coat, and a derby hat. He also sports a gold tooth. For someone who is so famously vain, Beatty certainly doesn’t mind looking like an idiot when the part calls for it. McCabe has a reputation as a gunfighter, even though it’s probably more likely that he has exaggerated his tales. McCabe is a dreamer, a visionary, which means he fits in with just about every other character that Beatty has played. McCabe is also very persuasive and charming, just like Clyde Barrow and Bugsy Siegel, the other outlaws Beatty has played. Unlike Barrow and Siegel, McCabe is not a sociopath. McCabe is a blowhard. He’s a great talker, just like Beatty. My favorite moment is Beatty’s monologue in the middle of the movie where he’s analyzing himself and his relationship with Mrs. Miller. It’s a very funny scene, and shows what a great comic actor Beatty is. Beatty said in an interview, “I like to play schmucks. Cocky schmucks. Guys who think they know it all but don’t. It’s been the story of my life to think I knew what I was talking about and later find out that I didn’t.” Beatty found similarities between McCabe and Clyde Barrow, saying, “They were not heroes. I found that to be funny, and Altman found it to be funny; we really agreed on that.” (Biskind, p. 151.) 

Julie Christie does a good job as Mrs. Miller, and she was nominated for an Oscar as Best Actress. Beatty and Christie were a real-life couple at the time “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” was made, and this was their first film together. (They would later star in “Shampoo” and “Heaven Can Wait” together.) There’s not a ton of chemistry between Beatty and Christie, but that’s not really the point of the movie. The soundtrack is made up of songs by Leonard Cohen, which, although anachronistic, fit the slow, melancholy nature of the movie perfectly. The songs that are in the movie are actually from Cohen’s first album, “Songs of Leonard Cohen,” from 1967, but they fit the movie so well that one might think that Cohen had written them especially for the movie. Cohen’s song “The Stranger Song,” with its references to gambling and card dealing fits McCabe’s character very well. The climactic shootout during the snowstorm is very well done. It’s a very long sequence, and there’s no music on the soundtrack during it, which just makes it more tense and suspenseful. 

Beatty and Altman didn’t get along, as their perspectives on filmmaking were total opposites. Altman preferred spontaneity and encouraged the actors to improvise their dialogue, while Beatty, ever the perfectionist, wanted take after take to choose from. Anne Sidaris, Altman’s assistant, said that Altman tended to manipulate actors into giving the performance he wanted. “I think he had trouble manipulating Warren, because Warren’s pretty strong-minded. Warren knew who he was, and that made him a different challenge.” (“Warren Beatty: A Private Man,” by Suzanne Finstad, p. 398.) Beatty said, “I believe in improvising, but I don’t believe in improvising from nothing. So I had to write a script...I worked quite a bit more on the script than he [Altman] did…My approach was more linear…I wrote most of the scenes that I was in.” (Biskind, p. 151.) Beatty was angered when he didn’t receive any writing credit on the movie, and Altman did. In the understatement of the century department, Altman said of Beatty, “Warren is basically a control freak. He wants to run the show.” (Biskind, p. 154.) The only thing that’s surprising about Beatty’s move into directing is that he didn’t start directing sooner. Beatty wouldn’t start directing until 1978’s “Heaven Can Wait,” which he actually co-directed with Buck Henry. Or, rather, Buck Henry got a co-directing credit, as Beatty initially wasn’t sure he could direct by himself, but Beatty quickly took over and shoved Henry to the side. Beatty and Altman clashed about how many takes to shoot, and at one point, Altman left the set at the end of the day and simply let Beatty and the crew shoot until Warren was happy. Beatty defended his perfectionism, saying, “A lot of times, Bob would wonder why I was working so hard. I’m just a person that thinks, when you go to all that trouble to set up a movie and build a set and get dressed and go there, I don’t see any harm in doing a number of takes.” (Biskind, p. 154.) Of course, Beatty doesn’t say how many “a number” is. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty takes? It’s a good thing that Beatty never worked with Stanley Kubrick; they might have never finished filming! 

“McCabe & Mrs. Miller” is a very interesting movie, if not a totally successful one. If you’re a fan of Robert Altman, Warren Beatty, or Julie Christie you should see it. Just remember to turn up the volume.