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The Carpetbaggers movie storyline. George Peppard plays a hard-driven industrialist more than a little reminiscent of Howard Hughes. While he builds airplanes, directs movies and breaks hearts, his friends and lovers try to reach his human side, and find that it’s an uphill battle. The film’s title is a metaphor for self-promoting tycoons who perform quick financial takeovers, impose dictatorial controls for short-term profits, then move on to greener pastures.
The Carpetbaggers is a 1964 American drama film directed by Edward Dmytryk, based on the best-selling 1961 novel The Carpetbaggers by Harold Robbins. It stars George Peppard as Jonas Cord, a character based loosely on Howard Hughes, and Alan Ladd in his last role as Nevada Smith, a former western gunslinger turned actor. Carroll Baker, Martha Hyer, Bob Cummings, and Elizabeth Ashley also star.
The film is a landmark of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, venturing further than most films of the period with its heated sexual embraces, innuendo, and sadism between men and women, much like the novel, where “there is sex and/or sadism every 17 pages”. Filmed in 35mm Panavision, this was one of the first movies to be blown up to 70mm (“Panavision 70″) for premiere screening[citation needed]. The Carpetbaggers was released in April 1964. Two years after this film, Steve McQueen played Ladd’s character in a Western prequel titled Nevada Smith.
Every generation has its modern carpetbaggers, its adventurers who gamble everything to stand head and shoulders above other men. Among them could be a creative giant, a do-gooder, a tyrant or a plunderer — a man who leaves his personal brand on everything and everyone he touches. I guess in the past generation it could have been someone like the fictional and fabulous Jonas Cord Junior — the best or the worst — depending on how much you imagined he might have hurt you… or how much you believed he helped you. The legend of Jonas spanned almost two decades and it began that April morning in the nineteen twenties… in the sky over the Nevada desert.”
Film Review for The Carpetbaggers
ow practically forgotten, The Carpetbaggers catalogs the financial rise and moral descent of half-cocked entrepreneur Jonas Cord Jr. (the tacitly manly George Peppard). The film was a blockbuster back in 1964 and could have been seen as the last word in silver screen sleaze…at least as far as mainstream America was concerned.
By no means as suggestive as any of the jazzy underground masterpieces from the era (namely Sam Fuller’s The Naked Kiss) or even the trashy frolic of Kitten with a Whip, The Carpetbaggers got its reputation by channeling the Cecil B. DeMille blueprint for lovingly (or lustingly) crafting smut tableaus laced with just enough 11th-hour morality to appeal to even the most puritanical of the blue-hairs. And it was the intended audience, and not the content per se, which informed its repute.
Now that the film is tame enough to merit a mere PG rating—the parlor game of trying to figure out whether or not the Harold Robbins tale is indeed about Howard Hughes will likely fly over the heads of younger cinephiles—what’s left? Camp. Pure, unadulterated camp. The most enduring image to emerge from the film is that of Carroll Baker straddling a French chandelier and shaking her shimmy until it careens to the floor, a high point in the long history of clumsy-sexpot kitsch that deserves mention alongside the string of slip-ups that pepper Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls.
After marrying the gravelly-voiced Elizabeth Ashley (who, when emoting sincerity, sounds uncannily like Sissy Spacek) and asking her what she would like to see on their honeymoon, her reply is “lots of beautiful ceilings.” Of course, The Carpetbaggers is also worthy of note for showcasing Alan Ladd’s final screen appearance as Nevada Smith, Cord’s ineffectual bosom buddy with a pipe dream of being a big western star (the 1966 spin-off Nevada Smith, starring Steve McQueen as the titular hero, is also being released on DVD by Paramount).
Director Dmytryk (well past his glory days as the auteur behind 1947’s incendiary anti-Semitic noir Crossfire) was still intuitive enough to save the best high camp moment for last: an undercranked knock-down brawl between Ladd and Peppard that climaxes with Peppard flipping the feeble Ladd onto his back with a bone-crunching thud. For all its facades, nothing in the film reads quite as false as the final scene, in which Ashley (who, halfway through the film, went from profligate flapper directly to maternal moral compass) makes a sane and adjusted family man out of Peppard. Sunrise it’s not.
The Carpetbaggers (1964)
Directed by: Edward Dmytryk
Starring: George Peppard, Alan Ladd, Bob Cummings, Martha Hyer, Elizabeth Ashley, Lew Ayres, Martin Balsam, Ralph Taeger, Archie Moore, Leif Erickson, Carroll Baker, Audrey Totter
Screenplay by: John Michael Hayes
Cinematography by: Joseph MacDonald
Film Editing by: Frank Bracht
Costume Design by: Edith Head
Set Decoration by: Sam Comer, Arthur Krams
Art Direction by: Hal Pereira, Walter H. Tyler
Music by: Elmer Bernstein
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Paramount Pictures
Release Date: April 9, 1964
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