Word: hardeman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...industrial melodrama, a product not known to sell many tickets, the thing starts out simply enough: Loren Hardeman Sr., 86, founder of the Bethlehem Motor Co. 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...
...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. For a delicious moment or two later...
...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...
...decency, actors should not be criticized for their performances in pictures as vulgar and banal as this one. But since Laurence Olivier has chosen to appear as the eldest Hardeman, and since he has sometimes triumphed over equally un promising roles, it is fair to say that he is as bad as everyone else. The public need only be warned that there aren't quite enough howlers to make this a camp classic like Once Is Not Enough or, to name an earlier picture that served Robbins perfectly, The Carpetbaggers. The film does, however, offer one possible source...
...projects that will not mock the accomplishments of a heroic career. Maybe a legion of his fans could from a club to intercept and screen all scripts before they reach him, discarding Harold Robbins and Ira Levin in the process. But then again, in accepting the role of Loren Hardeman, Olivier accepted the challenge of a role unlike any he had done before. At age 70, Laurence Olivier still has enough daring to teach us all a lesson...