The Carpetbaggers (1964)

The Carpetbaggers is the kind of trash classic most people are too embarrassed to admit they actually enjoy. But this Harold Robbins adaptation is so cheerfully vulgar, it's hard not to have a good time--especially given the thinly veiled portrait of Howard Hughes at its center. George Peppard plays the heel-hero, who founds an airline company in the 1920s and buys a movie studio in the 1930s, crushing friends and mistresses along the way. The high cheese factor is aided by the good-time cast: Carroll Baker as Peppard's hot stepmom, Bob Cummings (quite funny) as a cynical agent, and Elizabeth Ashley, who married Peppard, in her debut--uncharacteristically, as a good girl. The sad note is Alan Ladd, looking and sounding very end-of-the-line in his final role, as a man's man cowboy star. Elmer Bernstein's swaggering score helps goose the action along, but the rest is thick melodrama indeed. --Robert Horton Amazon.com

Trash at its most stylized best

Probably my favorite ALL TIME movie. I watch it not just for the story but also for the subtle facial expressions at certain moments...ohhh when Jonas decided he just found his lead actress in Rina, smirking as she was distributing the sandwiches to the out of work crew...his expression...Pappard is the epitome of cool...The whole film is Americana sine qua non just as American Grafitti is...The one liners are pricesless...Miss Baker is beyond perfect...LOVED IT! ALWAYS WILL! January 22, 2008

Excellent "Old Movie"

The Carpetbaggers was a movie I remember years ago, It was excellent then and it still is! January 12, 2008

Trashy...Sleezy...Over-The-Top Delicious!

Half the fun of watching this Harold Robbins potboiler comes from guessing who are the real-life figures (Howard Hughes? Jean Harlow? Jane Russell? Gary Cooper?) being fictionalized in this big, fat, supremely silly soap opera.

When millionaire Leif Erickson drops dead, George Peppard burst into the bedroom of his dad's gal Carroll Baker who - dressed on a Harlowesque, feather-trimmed robe - gushes, "I'm yours any way you want me. Love me!" He won't - he's too busy expanding the empire he's inherited - but Baker doesn't take "no" for an answer. "How do you like my widow's weeds?" she inquires, dressed in a tiny black lace nightie. "Get your revenge over with," she hisses, "Mistreat me, please, it has to be done. Anything. Everything. Then, throw me out!"

That he does, for when Peppard's surrogate father figure, Alan Ladd - the frailest-looking cowboy ever (perhaps from, as we are told, having "satisfied more women than a cavalry regiment on leave") - comes home, he finds Baker asking how old he is. When Ladd, the 40s star of The Blue Dahlia, replies, "Forty-three," Baker marvels, "You look thirty!" (Ladd was actually fifty and looked sixty). When Baker says she's twenty. Ladd snaps, "You look thirty!" (Actually, she's thirty-three.) "You always talk with your body?"he drawls, and she boasts her body "speaks several languages fluently."

Guess that includes French, for soon Baker's the wildest jazz baby in Paris, dancing on chandeliers, plucking out the feathers of her costume and wailing, "Vive la France!" Peppard's not interested, having taken up with playgirl Elizabeth Ashley, who purrs as she spins, "Wing spread thirty-seven, fuselage twenty-five - and hand-rubbed, by the way - tail is simply thirty-six. Shock-proof landing gear and never stalls in a dive."

Meanwhile, Ladd inexplicably becomes an action movie star and Peppard, to help him, hires Baker as the female lead. "Don't be ridiculous, I'm no actress," Baker chides -- right on the money -- but she becomes, in the words of agent Robert Cummings, "the biggest thing to happen in this town since the Spanish landed." And the biggest lush.

Peppard's dalliance with movies ruins his marriage to Ashley and when Baker dies in a car accident, Cummings unearths hooker Martha Hyer whom Peppard signs up to replace Baker and to whom he proposes marriage as part of the deal. Cummings tries blackmailing Hyer with a stag reel she's in, but Peppard says he's seen it twice). "That's why I wanted you," he explains. "You were beautiful and no good, and that made it better!" Hyer snaps "One of us is crazy - I'm not sure which one it is," and soon we learn what's driving ruthless Peppard: he had a twin brother who died insane!

In the end, he gives it all up for Ashley, and sermonize the narrator: "So ended the Jonas Cord legend, leaving its aspirations and its scars on those who lived under his creative genius as well as his tyranny."

December 17, 2007

superb movie

A great film with an engrossing story- I literally could not take my eyes off it.George Peppard's signature role (better than Tiffany's). If you long for a movie with a great story buy it! Congrats to Paramount for the excellent transfer- sharp with great colours and very little evidence of print damage. January 29, 2006

Love the music and the storyline.

I've been a fan of this version of the movie for years. I love the theme music, and the storyline. George Pappard is wonderful also. Definitely dated, a lot of sexist stuff, pre women's lib. September 6, 2005

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