The Carpetbaggers Movie Review
After I read the Carpetbaggers, I rented the movie to see how well it held up. In general the themes were the same, and I of course accept that a gigantic book will have trouble reducing to a movie - even a movie 2 1/2 hours long. Even so, there were some parts that disappointed me.The book had constant sex scenes, which of course were cleaned up for the movie version. But even so, they seemed to have to "tame" just about everything. In the beginning, Jonas is supposed to land his newly won plane on his own, having flown it from the card game he won it in. In the movie, he's just a passenger who takes the stick. They deliberately make him start out less in control, when the point of the book is that he always was in control, right from the beginning.
The opening conflict is that he got a girl pregnant, that she had an abortion and died. But in the movie, suddenly it's just that she "wanted to get married", tried to commit suicide and lived. Why weaken that? We're trying to say this is a rough-and-ready guy. Now he's just a sweet savior when girls try to take their own lives.
They have the Rina scene in there, where Cord goes after his step-mom. But in the book, Cord is turned off when he realizes Rina wants to get pregnant and bear Cord's child. In the movie, Cord never really wanted Rina at all apparently, he was just testing her. That changes the whole dynamic of their relationship.
You lose the ENTIRE back-story on Rina, which makes her just a sleaze-ball sleeper and has you get no sympathy at all for her in her story. She's a blonde bimbo. The same is done for Jennie. At least there you get a tiny mention of her past, but even so, it's hardly anything to give her any substance. She is a big-busted woman with no real meaning.
Even Nevada Smith is summarized in about 20 seconds in the beginning, in a scene which never happened. The whole Native American history is completely cut. You barely know about Nevada or why he's important to Cord.
So instead, the book is completely about Cord and what a jerk he was. He was an INCREDIBLE jerk to his wife in the movie, he was an INCREDIBLE jerk to Jennie. The movie has a lot of 2-D characters just there for Cord to be nasty to.
But what was worst in this movie is that they completely invented a twin brother for Cord who had mental illness, and then wrote the entire Cord mentality off to his worry that HE too would get a mental illness. That is why his dad drank. That is why Cord acted the way he did. It was a race against the onset of mental illness. And when Cord realizes that his daughter does NOT have any problem (i.e. that it is not a 100% genetic curse) then POOF Cord sells all his businesses, settles down and marries, in literally 1 day. It was a completely hokey ending.
I just hope that people at least read the book after watching the movie.
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