Les ambitieux

Harold Robbins' potboiler comes to the screen, trying to be something it isn't. Main character Jonas Cord is supposedly based on Howard Hughes, but George Peppard doesn't really convince in this role. Perhaps you need more than just good looks to be a trash fiction hero. Alan Ladd, in his final role, plays Nevada Smith, older friend of Cord and washed-up movie star – the role was played by Steve McQueen in a later film – and is okay, but again, somehow not quite right. Carroll 'Baby Doll' Baker is Cord's predatory step-mother; Elizabeth Ashley, Leif Erickson, Robert Cummings, Lew Ayres, Audrey Totter and Martha Hyer also contribute.

Perhaps the problem with 'The Carpetbaggers' is that it is never in danger of progressing beyond a simmer and the film really needs more to do the novel justice. This aside, it is fairly enjoyable as a time-filler and has moments enough not to completely disappoint: it also pointed the way for the glossy US soap operas of the 1970s and 1980s.

I'd heard of this movie, but had never gotten around to watching it... I was impressed by the quality of the script in some scenes and then let down in others... Interesting characters, though stereotypical. The pretty blonds, the cowboy, the drunks, the agents but one character stands out, and that is the wife of power hungry industrialist, Monica Wintrop. You think she'll flake but she keeps on going and in the end well... I won't spoil it for you! I think she has the best line in the movie. Here it goes: When her husband asks if she's pregnant: "It happens, you know, look at all the people in China!... Besides, accidents happen mostly in the home."

Adaptation of Harold Robbins' bestseller, about an egomaniacal Howard Hughes-like tycoon into airplanes, making movies and womanizing, comes to the screen without too much timidity; however, this "adult entertainment" is full of grown-ups acting like spoiled children (it isn't so much a Tinsel Town wallow as it is a bubbling cauldron of reckless immaturity), resulting in a camp melodrama that you can't tear yourself away from. George Peppard is the stony-faced tyrant who runs (and sometimes ruins) the lives of everyone in his path, and his plastic-formula panic is nearly funny; Elizabeth Ashley is the good girl he marries; Alan Ladd (in his final bow) is a faded cowboy star; Carroll Baker and Martha Hyer are lookalike starlets; Robert Cummings is a smarmy agent; Martin Balsam is a studio mogul on his way out. The whole tatty enterprise smacks of artificiality, with ugly sets and ridiculous character brawls, and yet one watches nearly hypnotized by the scandal sheet-styled, B-movie glamor. **1/2 from ****

Howard Hughes? Not really. George Peppard sketches a character without ever inhabit him. It's all effect. Carroll Baker, the brilliant Baby Doll, surrenders to the marketing demands and she revisits her aggressively sexual creature with more sparkle but less depth. Alan Ladd is the one that touches personal buttons and he is wonderful. Edward Dmytryck doesn't find a real center to Harold Robbins melodrama. Elizabeth Ashley's character exemplifies what I'm trying to say. Her journey is quite simply, absurd. She loves him and she hates him in a surprisingly unpredictable pattern. Absurd to such point that's not even entertaining but irritating. - As a side note, I had the experience to watch this movie on TCM with 5 twentysomethings - They laughed and laughed as if it was a hysterical comedy - I asked them what was so funny and their replay was, everything.

Like Charles Foster Kane, Jonas Cord is far more dashing and virile than the fellow this film carefully avoids claiming he was actually based on.

Harold Robbins' trashy 1961 bestseller cashing in on the late fifties fascination with the Roaring Twenties erupted into this Technicolor nonsense with a once in a lifetime cast (it was the debut of Elizabeth Ashley and the posthumous swansong of Alan Ladd). George Peppard is a much more rugged adventurer than the man it's not based on (who's actual story just continued to get weirder and weirder for another ten years after this version abruptly ends).