The Carpetbaggers

Edward Dmytryk's film is an overlong and derivative melodrama about the rise and fall of a brash, hard-hearted, emotionally-damaged entrepreneur, Jonas Cord (George Peppard), but it benefits from an interesting cast and a potboiler sweep (the script is based on the Harold Robbins novel of the same name) and delivers some quite good dialogue. With acrimonious jealousies, broken marriages and broken friendships, business betrayals and so on, it is entertaining for all its predictability.

In typical early 1960s Hollywood style there's scant regard for realism, the film being virtually entirely shot in the studio, and there's no sense of the passage of time whatever (some of the characters acquire grey hair to mark the passage but that's about it). Alan Ladd, who makes his final screen appearance, in the role of Nevada Smith, a real cowboy,  who makes it in the movies playing a cowboy, gives a nod to one of his own screen personae, and a mummified and very gay (but playing a heterosexual) Bob Cummings appears as an unctuous theatrical agent.

 

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