The opening credits fly through soaring clouds as Elmer Bernstein's wonderfully overwrought score heralds the beginning of another delicious adaptation of a sin-filled Harold Robbins soap opera. Solemn narration by Paul Frees sets the scene. The Carpetbaggers (1964) is the story of "the fictional and fabulous Jonas Cord Jr.", a business mogul, aviator, and movie producer loosely based (which is always the case in a Harold Robbins story) on Howard Hughes.

Jonas (George Peppard) dive bombs this father's chemical plant in a bi-plane that he won in a poker game. Cord Sr. (Leif Erickson) is tired of his son's wild ways and gives his son a stern lecture, but it's Jr. who gets in the last word, "You dried up, impotent old man," Jonas shouts, "You ought to be glad somebody in this family still has what it takes."

Daddy promptly drops dead, leaving junior to run the family business. Jonas returns home and tells his wicked stepmother that she's now a widow. Rina Marlow is wicked alright. She's a bad girl with a voracious sexual appetite and is played by Cool Cinema Trash favorite Carroll Baker in another vamp/sex goddess role. As she parades around in a lacy black negligee, Jonas quips, "If you'd have worn those to the funeral you wouldn't be a widow. He'd have climbed right out of the coffin."

Rina was once Jonas's sweetheart. Their spicy love/hate relationship and heated confrontations are courtesy of bad movie screenwriter John Michael Hayes. "Mistreat me, make love to me, anything, only get it over with," Rina pants. "It has to be done, anything, everything, then throw me out."

Jonas rejects her masochistic pleas, "You want sensation…the uglier the better. The more it hurts, the nicer it is. The more improper, the more exciting."

Before leaving for Germany to research the future of plastics, Jonas gives old family friend Nevada Smith (Alan Ladd in his final role) a file containing information that Jonas himself collected. "Wanted in six states," Jonas recites, "Took a job as a companion to a boy with no mother, no father to speak of. Max Sand. Ever hear of him?" The dossier titled The History of Max Sand contains the all the gritty details of Nevada's checkered past. Master and student part ways and Jonas is left alone in the vast Cord mansion. When he explores an abandoned room where everything is covered in cobwebs and dust, painful and melodramatic memories come folding back. The room belonged to…Jonas's brother!

Before embarking on their separate adventures, Rina and Nevada have a clandestine meeting. Rina prompts a hilarious conversation about their (improbable) ages before seducing the old cowboy. As she snuggles closer, Nevada asks, "Ma'am, do you always talk with your body?"

"It speaks several languages, fluently."

"Mine's downright illiterate."

"By morning I'll have you speaking like a native."

As the years pass the narrator explains that the Cord Empire has continued to grow. When Jonas meets with the founder of Winthrop Aviation in a hotel washroom, the concerned father can not stop worrying about his daughter Monica (Elizabeth Ashley). "She's seeing some playboy on the sly and…well, he's teaching her bad habits. I've got to get her away from him.'' That playboy is Jonas.

After buying the aircraft company, Jonas asks Monica, "What's the wildest thing you've ever done?"

"I was hoping I hadn't done it yet." Moments later they are married.

While recovering from a chandelier mishap in Paris, Rina receives a telegram from Nevada asking her to visit him in Hollywood where he has become a star in western shoot 'em up's. After arriving at Nevada's mansion, it's not long before the topic of conversation turns to Jonas. "You can't ride, fly, shoot a gun, mail a letter, make a phone call, or drink a cup of coffee that Jonas doesn't have something to do with." He explains.

Nevada gets into financial trouble when he attempts to film a version of the Max Sand story. Jonas lends a hand and, in the process, becomes a film producer. He clashes with studio head Bernard Norman (Martin Balsam) over the film's lousy leading lady. They need a new actress, fast. When Jonas catches a glimpse of Rina vamping it up on the set, he casts her in the role. Rina thinks he's joking, "Don't be ridiculous. I'm no actress." (Insert your own Carroll Baker joke here)

Monica pushes Jonas about their less than cozy domestic life. "The studio days and factory nights. What do you want me to do while I'm waiting?"

"Get a divorce."

After the movie is finished Rina is poised to become the biggest star in Hollywood. When summoned to Jonas' hotel suite, she announces that she's going to marry Nevada. Despite this news, Jonas intends to collect payment for making her a star. When Monica walks in on a half dressed Rina, she stops fighting Jonas's cruel affairs and tells him that she'll file for divorce in the morning.

Furious and humiliated, Rina shouts, "You're the meanest, cruelest, most loathsome thing I've ever met." Still, she doesn't put up much of a fight as he makes love to her.

"You're just like me," he hisses, "You can't make love to anyone you like."

"Oh yes, yes. Oh damn it, yes!" Baker manages to instill the line with as much pathos as possible. The next day Rina marries Nevada.

Jonas visits his ex-wife in the hospital. She looks positively radiant for just giving birth to a baby girl. "I'm the mother and you're the father, and that's just the way it is Jonas." Unbeknownst to him, Monica has uncovered the Cord family secret, "That baby only needs what you can't give it because you don't have it… faith! Faith in yourself, faith in your child, and faith in the future."

While testing passenger planes and drawing up military aircraft, Jonas makes plans to wrestle control of the film studio way from Bernard Norman. One evening, during a drunken joy-ride, Rina is killed in a car accident. Before Jonas can learn of her death, Norman schemes to sell Jonas the studio, which is worth next to nothing without its biggest star.

After signing on the dotted line and learning of Rina's death, Jonas awakens days later in the New York City flat of world-weary working gal Audrey Totter. "The Irish make lousy hookers," she admits, "We always get sentimental over drunks."

Now a major studio head, Jonas sets about rejuvenating the struggling company. Old friend Nevada Smith will continue to crank out his successful westerns. To replace Rina, a sassy prostitute named Jennie Denton (Martha Hyer) is hired. Jonas takes an instant liking to her and in between blockbusters he proposes marriage.

When a blackmail plot involving a stag film Jennie made surfaces, Jonas is hardly surprised, "I've seen it twice. You had good lighting and bad director. You were no good, that's why I wanted you. You were beautiful and no good, that made it better." Terrified by this glimpse of Jonas's cold heart, Jennie heads for the hills.

After witnessing the ruthless treatment of Jennie, Nevada has had enough, "I stood by while you grew big in power and small in humanness. But never until this moment have I judged the full measure of your cruelty and madness."

No one calls Jonas Cord crazy. In a sublimely silly soap opera brawl that brings to mind moments from television's Dynasty, Jonas and Nevada (actually, their stuntmen) tumble over furniture, throw punches, and smash everything that isn't nailed down. The immaculate hotel suite is demolished after a few minutes of cinematic fisticuffs. While sharing a drink, Nevada delves into the dark emotional past of Jonas's twin brother. "Born with you, died without you at the age of nine. Incurably insane. Incurably insane!" Nevada uses pop psychology to clarify Jonas's pathological behavior, "So your brother died raving mad and your father turned against you and you decided to take it out on everyone else around you." After years of tormenting everyone around him, Jonas reaches a turning point and, in grand bad movie tradition, smashes a mirror.

When Jonas visits Monica in Chicago he admits he's "Been living with a secret."

But it's no secret. Monica knows everything about Jonas's tortured childhood. "Why do you think I let you do the things you did to me? Why I didn't remarry and I waited, hoping you'd find out there was nothing wrong with you and nothing wrong with your daughter."

Jonas wants another chance, but she's been down this road before. With a simple and somewhat inadequate, "I love you and I need you," all is forgiven. Jonas is redeemed and has a happy family life to look forward to.

There are two slightly different versions of the ending. In the original, Monica and Jonas embrace as the orchestra swells and the end title card zooms forward. In the out-of-print Paramount VHS release, the visuals remain the same, but the narrator chimes in one last time. "And 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." This narrative addendum may have been an attempt to soften the movie's rather abrupt happy Hollywood ending.

Harold Robbins' original novel is an incredibly dense chronicle of its fictional hero's rise and fall. It's packed with salacious detail. Even secondary characters have entire portions of the book that detail their complex back stories and history with Jonas Cord. The characters were so richly drawn that producer Joseph E. Levine would later use the comprehensive back story of Alan Ladd's character to make the Steve McQueen prequel/western Nevada Smith (1966).

The novel was far more graphic and shocking than the movie would have ever been allowed to be. Despite this, The Carpetbaggers was considered pretty racy in its day. Nearly all of the film's promotional materials touted it as "adult entertainment". Today the film is rated PG.

CCT also recommends:

The Adventurers

The Betsy

Where Love Has Gone

If renting movies is for you, try Netflix. They stock most of the movies CCT recommends.