Low & Inside

The Carpetbaggers, based on the baldly sleazy bestseller by Harold Robbins, is the kind of movie that you cannot put down. Like the book, it scores its cheap success as a swift, irresistibly vulgar compilation of all the racy stories anyone has ever heard about wicked old Hollywood of the '20s and '30s. The titillation is masked as the biography of a fresh young tycoon whose interests --airlines, moviemaking, starlets--bear certain obvious though wildly embellished parallels to the career of Howard Hughes.

When his father suffers a fatal stroke, Jonas Cord Jr. (George Peppard) rushes straight home from the factory to make a pass at daddy's flammable blonde wife, Carroll Baker. "You wouldn't dare!" she screams. But in a movie like this, a statement like that means let's dance. In no time at all, the lady appears in black chiffon to ask: "How d'ya like my widow's weeds?" As the girl eventually transformed into Rina Marlowe, a doomed Hollywood sex goddess, Actress Baker seems uncertain about which actress living or dead she is not supposed to resemble. Although her widely publicized nude scene has been disnuded, she wears costumes that thinly conceal the loss, and also delivers some of the film's funniest asides. Sinking into the horn-and-hide trappings of a limousine belonging to Western He-man Nevada Smith (Alan Ladd), she burbles in her best Baby Doll manner: "I feel like I've been swallowed by a buffalo."

Meanwhile Peppard bullishly amasses a fortune, exploiting "this new product --plastic," building up a transcontinental airline, and making lots of people miserable. His victims include Lew Ayres, Bob Cummings and Martha Hyer, a high-priced call girl who is summoned for stardom. To prevent all the plots and subplots from collapsing, Director Edward Dmytryk keeps a narrator warmed up to respond to the question, "How did it all happen?" with quick summaries of Robbins' lip-smacking prose. Thus Scenarist John Michael Hayes leaps 30 to 40 pages at a clip and distills the rest of it in dialogue that ranges from archly metaphoric repartee to raw one-line gags.

The only Carpetbagger exhaling unpolluted air is Broadway Actress Elizabeth Ashley. Given an insipid role as the cast-off wife who keeps stumbling over platinum blondes in Peppard's hotel suites, she turns her rough-velvet charm to advantage in a performance that bleach cannot beat. Peppard himself works manfully to conquer the handicaps of a script climaxed by preposterous revelations fraught with pop psychology, an excess that even the book avoided. Seems Peppard isn't such a bad sort, after all. He became rich, ruthless and depraved because his father had hated him ever since--ah, well. Presumably, after savoring nearly three hours of feisty smut, the audience will be delighted to learn that it couldn't have been dished out by a nicer fella.

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