The Carpetbaggers, based on the baldly sleazy bestseller by Harold Robbins, is the kind of movie that you cannot put down. Like the book, it scores its cheap success as a swift, irresistibly vulgar compilation of all the racy stories anyone has ever heard about wicked old Hollywood of the '20s and '30s. The titillation is masked as the biography of a fresh young tycoon whose interests —airlines, moviemaking, starlets—bear certain obvious though wildly embellished parallels to the career of Howard Hughes.
When his father suffers a fatal stroke, Jonas Cord Jr. (George Peppard)...