Word: angelo
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...back in the heroic days of car manufacturing, is tired of vegetating down in Florida. He wants to make his comeback by manufacturing "the Betsy," a sort of Model T cum Volkswagen for the '70s, ecologically sound, energy conserving, sensible. He hires a stud race-car driver, one Angelo Perino (Tommy Lee Jones), to honcho the project back at the factory, sneaking it by Loren Hardeman III, the old man's grandson (Robert Duvall), who loves cars less than the balance sheet, his mistress more than his wife, and is an all-around blue meanie...
...that's all just a sort of framing device. What really interests Novelist Harold Robbins and the kind of people who make adaptations of his work is sex. The synopsis maker starts to get into trouble here because the bed hopping is so preposterously cross-generational. Angelo begins by having it off with the younger Hardeman's mistress, Lady Ayres (names with metaphorical overtones seem to be a Robbins specialty), as a kind of warm-up for his affair with Betsy-not the car, but the fourth-generation Hardeman (Kathleen Seller) after whom the vehicle is named...
...Betsy is replete with flashbacks that garishly, superficially "explain" the edgy relationship between Grandpa and Grandson Hardeman and also demonstrate, finally, why the old boy likes Angelo so much. For, you see, the old gentleman himself got around a bit in his day-notably into the marital bed of his son, the closet queen. Turns out it was witnessing these incestuous goings-on and his weakling father's subsequent suicide that made Grandson Hardeman such a misery to himself and his coworkers...
...course, everything works out in the end. Angelo gets control of both Betsy and the Betsy, which goes into production despite various corporate shenanigans...
Then, just as he had so many times before, Ali tried to take command in the middle rounds, and for a time the old magic blinked on. In the champion's corner, Trainer Angelo Dundee had noticed that Spinks' early bobbing and weaving had degenerated into an amateur's dangerously upright stance as the young challenger appeared to tire. "This is it," Dundee told Ali before the 10th round. "He's ready to fall. This round, champ, this round. Go get him! Hit him! Take...