The Carpetbaggers (movie)

I’ve been meaning to see the movie (& possibly read the book) of this for years. Back in 2003 or so when my Grandmother first moved in with me, we got on this kick where we were watching westerns together. There was one movie that stood out to me & I have seen well over a dozen times now. That movie is Nevada Smith. I even wrote a song about it & talked about the movie at most of my live shows from 2003-2011. Anyway, Nevada Smith is a character in the movie/book The Carpetbaggers & the movie Nevada Smith is a derivative work. So I wanted to check this out, but never found it anywhere. Which seemed odd given it’s supposed to be such a popular & high selling book despite it being from 1961. The things I’d found out looking around for it were it was vaguely based on Howard Hughes & it was seemingly more a collection of scenes of sex & violence rather than a novel (which actually sounds more interesting than a novel to me).

Today I was chatting with a buddy of mine & mentioned something about wanting to read The Carpetbaggers & he said it wasn’t really that great & had I ever seen the movie. So I looked around for it on the internet & there it was in its entirety on YouTube. The movie actually stars George Peppard (known to folks of my age as Hannibal from The A-Team) & Alan Ladd & a ton of character actors that any fan of movies from the 1950s & 1960s will recognize. This movie is odd to me as it is strangely lacking in action & of course the sex scenes are so tame by modern standards. It is not a pleasant movie to watch in anyway, it reminds me of The Last Time I Saw Paris as far as it just having a lot of non-likable characters being jerks to each other, but quite a bit clumsier. I still kind of want to read the book.