Robert De Niro, Off the Beaten Track: 5 Films to Rediscover the Actor

A curiosity. A commissioned film and Elia Kazan's final directorial effort, it is playwright Harold Pinter's adaptation of Francis Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon. It is inspired by the real-life figure of Irving Thalberg, the embodiment of the visionary producer and creator of Hollywood's golden age. Robert De Niro had just finished his Taxi Driver experience when he became this authoritarian and tormented mogul.

The film thus marks the passing of the baton between Old and New Hollywood with a cast that includes, in addition to De Niro and Jack Nicholson, the generation embodied by Robert Mitchum, Tony Curtis and Jeanne Moreau. A great classic tinged with a twilight atmosphere, fueled by the morbid passion of the producer, Monroe Stahr, for a young girl, a double of his deceased wife, who refuses him.

In the long and prolific collaboration between Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, this film is the most unusual and arguably the biggest commercial failure for the director. Yet this dark comedy, made just after Raging Bull from a script contributed by De Niro, is worth more than the oblivion into which it fell.

First, because it's a fierce satire of the 1980s hunger for media stardom that hasn't aged a bit today. Second, because it stars Jerry Lewis as a TV show star, adored by a horde of hysterical fans. Last but not least, for De Niro's incredible performance as a pathetic loser who transforms into an evil psychopath to get his fifteen minutes of fame.

The actor has stepped behind the camera twice. The first was in 1993 to adapt the play written by his friend Chazz Palminteri, which recounted his childhood as an Italian-American boy, torn between his fascination with the thug life and his respect for his father, a humble bus driver. Palminteri plays the role of the thug, Sonny, who takes the young Calogero under his wing and frees him from the influence of his father, Lorenzo, played by De Niro himself.

The film, in its romantic scope and its social anchoring in the 1950s Bronx, borrows as much from Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America as from the world of Scorsese. In this film dedicated to his father, De Niro summons his own childhood memories.

While he's a director, Robert De Niro also produces some of the films he stars in. This is the case in this excellent satirical comedy about the President of the United States, campaigning for reelection, who is embroiled in a sex scandal. The American actor plays a wily political advisor who, with a whimsical Hollywood producer (Dustin Hoffman in great form), invents a war in Albania to divert media attention.

Truth or lie, it doesn't matter; the most compelling story wins. A prophetic scenario, since a month after the film's release, President Clinton, embroiled in "Monicagate," committed the United States to three military operations... Reality always surpasses fiction.

Robert De Niro isn't lacking in humor or perspective. Taking a turn toward comedy, he parodies his own mafia characters from Martin Scorsese's films Goodfellas and Casino by taking on the role of Paul Vitti, a New York crime boss suffering from panic attacks! He goes to see a psychiatrist (Billy Crystal), who accepts this troublesome new patient, without much choice.

Mafia Blues doesn't skimp on clichés or nods to gangster movies, and even though De Niro is a bit of a ham, he is very well directed, as is his sidekick Billy Crystal, ensuring the film a surprise success at the time. Other comedies would follow in which De Niro would mock his past roles, such as the timeless Meet the Father (2000).