MonsterHunter

I’m going to go out on a limb here and hazard a guess that Sir Laurence Olivier didn’t receive his knighthood for his scene in this movie where he got all turned on by watching his daughter-in-law nursing his grandson and ended up bedding her down at the conclusion of a ten o’clock feeding that left the audience sick to its stomach. Whether this is the single worst scene of this movie is open to debate since the movie is strewn with them, but it has to be the most memorably tacky of them. That you’ve got a venerated film legend cashing a $400,000 paycheck for doing so only adds to queasiness of the scene.

Larry would go on to cash million dollar paydays for both the The Jazz Singer (the 1980 remake that made Neil Diamond one of our country’s biggest movie stars, not the 1927 original - though Larry was certainly old enough to have been in it) and something called Inchon which also starred Jacqueline Bisset, David “The Fugitive” Janssen, Tochiro Mifune, Shaft, and film critic Rex Reed. One can only imagine what someone would have to say about that particular movie if there was any record that a single human being ever saw it.

Sir Larry wouldn’t be the only guy to trade on his reputation as a film legend to pick up movie welfare later in life (paging Sir Richard Burton!), but surely there was some other big budget flop being made in the late seventies that didn’t involve Larry attempting to play both an old coot and his younger self in flashback. Watching him with his absurdly dyed hair as we traveled down mammary lane with him to the 1930s only made us wish that we could go back to 1975 where a pasty-faced up and comer named Tommy Lee Jones took center stage.

Since at this time Tommy Lee was still pretty new to the biz, you knew he wasn’t getting some bloated salary for abusing his talents like Sir Larry, but was probably still in the process of “paying his dues” which means that he was abusing his talents for a pittance. For Tommy Lee, it would be years and years until he would have to resort to appearing in movies like Space Cowboys and The Hunted. And you just know that Robert Duvall was wondering what the hell happened to him that he was in this thing after appearing in a couple of Godfather movies.

I suppose the intent with this movie was to make one of those big screen soap operas about the rise and fall of a powerful family where we follow their battles in both the boardroom and the bedroom. It was after all based on a Harold Robbins novel and we all remember the rich, dysfunctional family that was featured in The Carpetbaggers. That one qualified as enjoyable trash chiefly because of George Peppard’s scenery chewing and the film industry setting.

The Betsy though is spread out over too many characters for anyone to really take control of the movie and its yawn-inducing Detroit automaker universe isn’t exactly the sort of industry that captures your interest. Everyone knows that The Carpetbaggers was to some extent a fictionalization of Howard Hughes’s adventures in Hollywood, but not only do I have no clue if The Betsy is related to the Ford, Chrysler, or Jeep families, I don’t even care.

You’ve got Sir Larry playing Loren Hardeman, the patriarch of the family and he’s one of those overbearing types that expects more out of his son and grandson than they can live up to. Well how can you be expected to concentrate on the business end of things when you’re wondering if dear old dad is concentrating on your wife’s end of things?

Sir Larry’s grandson witness his father’s suicide as well as seeing his mom and grandfather in bed together. And just for maximum impact he sees all this on the same night! This little kid grows up to be a very embittered Robert Duvall and for some reason he holds a grudge against gramps and as the president of the company uses whatever means he can to bring that dirty old man down. Even if it means destroying the Betsy!

The Betsy of course is the car that Sir Larry hires Tommy Lee Jones to build. Tommy Lee plays star race car driver Angelo Perino (trust me - I only wish I was making this up as I went along) and for some reason Sir Larry decides that since Angelo is a great racer, he’ll make an even better car designer. The movie reveals a connection that the Hardemans have with the Perino family later on, but I don’t think it had anything to do with Angelo getting the job. After all, the connection just involved Angelo’s dad having a guy thrown out a window that was threatening to blackmail Sir Larry with pictures apparently showing his son’s homosexual activities. (You get the idea that Harold Robbins had a little checklist of “taboo” subjects made up and was just checking them off as he went along. Incest? Check! Homosexuality? Check! Robert Duvall playing handball in too-tight shorts? Check!)

Sir Larry wants the Betsy to be the car that the common man and woman buy like the Model T was back in its heyday. He envisions an economical car that gets really good gas mileage and he feels like its better to go ahead and make a car that meets the various standards Washington wants before Washington mandates it. So I’m watching a family’s power struggle over whether to build an ugly compact car that Americans won’t buy anyway? Where do people get the idea that Americans are ever going to give up their pick ups or sport utility vehicles? Whenever gas prices go up there’s exactly two responses: start drilling in Alaska for more and let’s take over some Arab country! Only Ed Begley, Jr. and his actor friends talk about smaller cars run on batteries. (Ed, we run our kids’ remote control cars on batteries!)

So even though we’re supposed to be rooting for the ambitious Angelo and his oldster mentor in their quest to build the car that will put BMC back in the black, we can’t help but agree with dirty, underhanded Loren Hardeman III (Duvall) when he complains that this car is going to sink the company. He even uses a flimsy cardboard chart to laughably demonstrate to his grandpa and the rest of the Board (why am I watching a movie about board meetings?) that BMC has diversified and that only the auto division is sucking wind and that the whole point of the strategy to make the company profitable is to phase out the car business entirely. Despite this sound business plan, Sir Larry gets enough votes to extend the movie another 90 minutes, I mean to build the Betsy, and thus sets in motion a struggle for the very soul of the company!

It doesn’t take long before we see the lengths that Loren III will go to make sure the Betsy doesn’t succeed as we discover that Angelo’s helmet is bugged, he gets followed around Detroit during a test drive, an unfavorable report appears in an automobile magazine and he gets beat up by a bunch of thugs in a parking garage! The funniest part of all this is that he’s test driving a Pinto with a new engine dropped in it! A Pinto? This movie stars both Sir Laurence Olivier and a souped-up Pinto? That probably even tops Dean Jones and Herbie the Love Bug in the annals of classic great actor/great car team-ups!

In between incidents of industrial sabotage and intimidation, Angelo finds time to get it on with a couple of honeys. He has an affair with Lady Bobby Ayres who also happens to be Loren III’s somewhat ambivalent mistress. Her character really has no point and appears sporadically to cause problems with Loren III and his wife and to ruin Loren III’s daughter’s twenty-first birthday party. Loren III and Angelo never even have a confrontation over the fact that they’re both screwing her!

When Angelo isn’t being squeezed in by Lady Bobby between bouts of adultery with Loren III, he’s humping Loren III’s daughter, Betsy. Yes, as in the famous compact car, the Betsy. Grandpa named it after her and then went and gave her forty percent of the voting shares of stock in the company on her birthday. This would come in handy later on when Angelo would go up against both Loren III and Loren I for control of the company in an effort to save the Betsy. Especially since it saved Angelo from humping Loren I in an effort to get the support of that 40%.

After making some deals with his shady relatives, Angelo launches his big attack on the various Lorens and seizes control of the company. This involves him pulling a bunch of different documents out of his briefcase which isn’t usually the hallmark of a riveting climax to a film. Here’s the proof that you hired the auto magazine to discredit the Betsy, Loren III! Here’s the proxy of Betsy’s 40% interest! Here’s my grocery list for stuff I need to get after work! Here’s the “inspected by #5″ tag that came with my new power broker briefcase!

All of this paperwork is accompanied by dramatic announcements about firing the Board, demanding Loren III’s resignation, and how he’s exercising his option to buy 2% of the voting shares with one quarter of the purchase price down and the balance due within 30 days. Once it becomes clear that Angelo has outfoxed him, Loren I gives one of those “student has bested the teacher” smiles and says something ridiculous like “well played.”

Go ahead and haul out all of your car wreck metaphors, flat tire similes, blown engine analogies, and lemon cliches because they all are appropriate in this case. Somehow managing the difficult feat of being simultaneously laughable and boring, The Betsy even acts like it’s two terrible movies since the dull flashbacks to Loren I’s life in the 1930s is completely overdone and makes the stuff involving Tommy Lee in the seventies only seem like the second-worst movie of all time.

The girl that played Betsy is awful and completely unnatural in every one of her scenes, while the rest of the female cast is reduced to mere sex partner status. Watching Katharine Ross’s vacant expression during her icky scenes with Sir Larry, you can read her mind as she’s thinking “but I was in The Graduate and Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid - what happened to me?” Don’t get too down yet Kathy, up next for you was the killer bee epic The Swarm.

The careers of the major male players involved didn’t seem to be similarly affected by this bomb. Duvall and Tommy Lee would go on and do the work they’re most famous for, while Sir Larry would pick up several more titanic paydays in a number of other terrible films before croaking. Normally, I’d complain at this point that the Warner Brothers DVD was presented full frame instead of its original aspect ratio, but this thing stinks so much, I don’t think I really mind that a good chunk of the original picture was lost in the transfer. In fact, all things considered, I prefer it that way.

© 2008 MonsterHunter