MonsterHunter

This movie confirmed to me what I always suspected. Namely, that I have really bad taste. How else can I explain that despite the fact that this film was two hours and twenty minutes of silly soap opera trash, I had little problem sitting through all of it? The story of Jonas Cord was little more than incident after incident of him bullying his way through some business deal or other and treating everyone around him like dirt. I didn’t really mind any of it, even though it never amounted to much and was neatly tied up in one of the most simplistic and least believable endings you’re likely to see. (The movie purports to be a thinly-veiled take on the life of Howard Hughes, but doesn’t have the guts to let Jonas Cord have the same finish as the reclusive tycoon.)

Based on a novel by Harold Robbins, The Carpetbaggers immediately grabs your attention as the self-important garbage it is as soon as the opening credits roll. Accompanied by an obnoxious score that would have been at home in such disaster parodies as Airplane, the credits themselves are bright red and come flying in at you Superman-style against the backdrop of a cloudy sky. Then a narrator makes a brief appearance introducing us to the fictional tale of Jonas Cord and about how there are great men in each generation that do great things and lists some of the great things they can do, all of which seemed unnecessary since I figured that you had almost two and half hours to show me what sort of impact this great man could have on the world. Just get me to the scenes of George Peppard destroying people’s lives already!

Thankfully, the movie did that in short order, showing us a confrontation he has with his businessman-father Jonas, Sr. Dad has called Junior on the carpet for another one of Junior’s flings with the ladies. He’s gone and promised some hottie that he was going to marry her, then backed out like he has with all the women before. Now she is squeezing them for a cash settlement or she’ll file a breach of promise lawsuit against them. Senior is outraged at Junior’s behavior, but Junior isn’t exactly repentant. After attempting to castigate his son with a bunch of jive about real men having brains in their heads, not in their pants, Junior fires back about his dad being an impotent old man and that it was good that Junior does what he does so that his dad’s wife won’t think all the Cord men are losers!

Though I’m a big fan of such scenes, having to had beat own father down a couple of times for being a punk, I was also a bit worried that this would be one of those movies where Junior would be having run ins with dad every half hour or so, thus slowing down Junior’s ruthless business ways and his callow treatment of the money-grubbing skanks he was sure to bed down and throw out like yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. But Harold Robbins didn’t proclaim himself the “world’s best writer” and sell three quarters of a billion books, by getting bogged down in stuffy father-son arguments. So, right after Junior calls his dad out for not being “on top of his game” and needing a dose of new wonderdrug Levitra, the old man croaks right there in the office!

Jonas is left in control of his father’s company with 90% of the shares. He makes plans to acquire just about all the rest and starts barking out orders and firing the sycophants he doesn’t think will cut the mustard (hint for sycophants: once Junior’s hated dad dies and is charge, don’t call the kid “Junior” anymore!). He has all sorts of plans including getting involved in some newfangled thing the Germans are working on called plastics. But as any budding tycoon will tell you, the real thrill isn’t the art of the deal so much as getting revenge on the scumbags you’ve harbored and nursed grudges against for years! Next stop: dad’s mansion where Jonas’ step mom is staying.

Is she some type of dried up wicked step mother type who is out to steal his company from him? Not exactly. Rina Marlow Cord is a young blonde hussy played by Carroll Baker (The Big Country) and Jonas aims to show her who’s boss now that daddy is out of the picture. He forces himself on her and when she finally gives in and admits that she really wants him now that his dad is dead, Jonas stops and tells her that he wanted to see how far she’d go and that he’ll have his revenge later on. Those of us with more strictly defined boundaries than what Jonas and his stepmother display in this film (i.e. don’t try hump your stepmom or stepson) should relax a little bit because this isn’t your typical stepmom/stepson affair.

It turns out that before Rina was Jonas’ stepmom, she was his girlfriend! Jonas brought her home and somehow his dad stole her away from him! You can bet there wasn’t a lot of that “you’re an impotent louse” stuff being shoveled by Jonas at his dad that day! When Jonas demands to know what his dad said about him to her, she claims that he said Jonas was too young for her. I think it’s a sign of good parenting when you look out for your kid by sabotaging their bad relationships by marrying their girlfriends. Most parents wouldn’t really go that extra mile. Rina for her part is obviously as demented as the Cords and Jonas eventually gets her to admit that she’s just like him in that she only likes “it” when it’s dirty and exciting and not about love. Predictably, Jonas would get involved in the motion picture industry and turn her into a star. But that comes much later.

Before that, we are treated to what passes for as characterization as to Jonas. This involves him going into a locked room in his dad’s house and looking around at all the cobwebbed furniture and things. It’s clearly a child’s room that hasn’t been touched in twenty years or so and Jonas has a bit of a breakdown as he hears his father’s voice in his head telling him not to go into that room and Jonas is just wanting to see his brother, but his dad says his brother is gone and not coming back. Jonas has to be physically removed from the room by one of the servants and we are left to wonder what this terrible secret is that no doubt will serve as the armchair psycho babble at the end of the movie to justify everything he’s done.

Jonas embarks on his world conquering by buying up businesses, plastering his name on them, and inventing new businesses. He gets involved in pioneering the cross country airline industry and meets his wife at the same time he’s busy destroying her father by buying him off and firing him from the company he founded. (It’s not as mean as it probably sounds because that guy was a no good drunk using his daughter to try and guilt Jonas into giving him more money.)

Her name is Monica (played by George Peppard’s one time real life wife Elizabeth Ashley) and I can’t say that I ever figured out what made her tick. She’s one of those dames that knows exactly what type of person Jonas is (workaholic guy who openly admits he’s incapable of feeling anything approaching love, but doesn’t have much trouble feeling lust for whatever tramp is in his various hotel suites), marries him anyway and then whines about how he’s a loveless, faithless, workaholic, but waits on him to change for a billion years or so. She’s too much of a doormat to feel any sympathy for and you can bet that Jonas doesn’t. Besides, there’s an ex-hooker that he’s going to turn into a movie star in his future. (She’s a different blonde than the ex-stepmom he’s going to turn into a movie star.)

After his old buddy Nevada Smith (Steve McQueen starred in a movie based on this character a couple of years after The Carpetbaggers came out) gets into trouble out in Hollywood, Jonas steps in to help out and gets sucked into the picture-making game. Nevada was a wild west outlaw with a colorful past who left it all behind to become Jonas’ companion since Jonas was a boy. He’s the closest thing to a friend that Jonas ever had. They would end up beating the piss out of each other in a brutal fight at the end of the movie.

Nevada has somehow become the most popular western film star of his era (the late 1920s when the talkies were in their infancy), but is in dire straits money-wise because of some film deal gone wrong. Jonas arrives and eventually ends up firing the director, spicing up the script, trimming Nevada’s role and hiring his stepmom to play the owner of a house of ill repute. This makes Rina a big star and she and Nevada get married. All the while, Jonas’ own marriage disintegrates due to his obsession with work and meaningless encounters with women, eventually forcing Monica to leave in spite of her being pregnant with his child.

Making movies consumes Jonas as he gets tricked into buying a movie studio without knowing that its only star (Rina) has been killed in automobile accident. He declares that he’s going to live on the studio lot and starts barking orders just like he did right after he took over his father’s company, determined to make this venture succeed. He meets an ex-hooker that his former employee, the double-crossing agent Dan Pierce, had arranged a screen test for. He makes her a big star and is going to marry her, but Dan tries to blackmail her about her past. She tells Jonas who already knows about her sordid history and doesn’t mind. By now he’s become so devoid of normal human emotions that she walks out on him, repulsed by his calculating soulless ways.

As junky as all of this was, it’s the ending that really pulls it all together and makes this the total package of pop culture refuse. You’ve got Jonas’ big secret revealed and it purports to be the motivation for him being such inhuman slime. Since this is a Hollywood version of people with emotional problems deeply rooted in their dysfunctional childhoods, Jonas is pretty much able to throw off all his neuroses after a fight and conversation with Nevada, followed up by a quick trip to see Monica eight years after their marriage ended and finding her ready to take him back. A real crowd-pleasing ending, except by this time, you’d like to see Jonas die a miserable, lonely old man, instead of being rewarded and suffer no consequences for his actions.

Like its main character, the movie is what it is and doesn’t make any apologies for it. You want high art and penetrating insight into the human condition, find a foreign film where people sit around and talk and smoke cigarettes a lot. You want a big, glossy-looking paperback movie where stars like George Peppard, Robert Cummings (Kings Row), and film noir icon Alan Ladd (The Blue Dahlia, This Gun For Hire , The Glass Key ) in his last role, drop silly dialogue like Jonas drops blonde starlets and engage in increasingly ridiculous situations (hiring your ex-girlfriend and ex-stepmother to star in a film with your ex-bodyguard? Is this part of the movie or a pitch for a sitcom?) while wearing nice suits and maintaining perfect haircuts, this is your baby. There’s nothing to recommend in it beyond pure spectacle, but as an American consumer raised way back in the twentieth century, I don’t really need anything other than that!

© 2008 MonsterHunter