Film
The Carpetbaggers
A sweeping 1960s melodrama about an ambitious, ruthless aircraft manufacturer navigating power, sex, and empire in Depression-era Hollywood. It's trashy, star-studded spectacle—scandal sheet drama dressed up in expensive sets and period detail. Perfect for anyone who loves old Hollywood soap opera with genuine stakes and zero restraint.
Should you watch it?
Watch it if you enjoy glossy, melodramatic studio-era sagas about ambitious men and the women they wreck, where the pleasure is in the lavish excess and the sheer nerve of the storytelling.
Skip it if you want a tight, restrained film; this one sprawls across decades of business deals and romantic entanglements with a lot of strutting and very little quiet.
What it asks of you: It asks for well over two and a half hours and a willingness to sit through big, theatrical emotions played at full volume, with the pace favouring spectacle over subtle character work.
Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.
If you liked this
The Godfather1972
Epic scope, generational wealth, moral corruption, and a protagonist whose charm masks ruthlessness. The machinery of power grinding personal relationships into dust. It's the gold standard Cord should have been.
But At over three hours and deliberately paced, it demands patience. Not a plot engine; a meditation.
Citizen Kane1941
The original biography of ambition: a man who wants everything, gets most of it, and discovers it's hollow. Kane and Cord are cousins—both born into hunger, not poverty, and it shows.
But Formally experimental and seventy-five years old. The technical brilliance matters more than narrative momentum.
Network1976
Same era obsession: media, power, seduction, the corruption that comes from wanting to own the world. Paddy Chayefsky's script burns with the same contempt for the comfortable wealthy that makes Carpetbaggers tick.
But It's a sermon, essentially. The satire is blunt. If subtlety is your preference, this will feel sledgehammer.
Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from The Carpetbaggers
The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
Inland Empire2006
Both are obsessed with the gap between Hollywood's surface and what actually drives it—sex, power, lies—but Lynch believes the machinery is fundamentally mad, not just corrupt.
David Lynch's three-hour nightmare about Hollywood, acting, identity, and the machinery that destroys people. It takes the glamorous corruption of Carpetbaggers and turns it inside out—the same ambitions, the same wreckage, rendered as surrealist horror.
But Difficult, nonlinear, and genuinely unsettling. Shot on digital video. No plot in the conventional sense. If you want narrative clarity, this is the opposite.
More like this (7)
Once Upon a Time in America1984
Two hours of Sergio Leone's most mature work: ambition, betrayal, and the price of empire. That same 20th-century myth-making, the same tragic arc from hunger to hollowness.
But Nonlinear, deeply melancholic, and genuinely slow. This is not entertainment in the Carpetbaggers sense—it's requiem.
Raintree County1957
Lavish, scandal-ridden historical melodrama with a similar sweep and moral complexity. Montgomery Clift as a man with secrets. The kind of big, expensive, somewhat messy Hollywood epic that Carpetbaggers deliberately imitates.
But Uneven. Some scenes sing; others sag. It's not as polished as the reputation suggests.
The Best Man1964
Released the same year. Henry Fonda's acid screenplay about ambition, compromise, and what you'll do for power. It's leaner and smarter than Carpetbaggers but from the same bloodline.
But A political drama first, entertainment second. Less soap, more cerebral.
Peyton Place1957
The template for high-class scandal drama: small-town secrets with A-list production values. Lana Turner in full fury. It made the formula respectable and Carpetbaggers ran with it.
But Dated mores around sexuality and scandal. Some of its shock value has evaporated.
The Power and the Glory1933
Spencer Tracy as a railroad magnate whose ruthlessness costs him everything that matters. It's the spiritual ancestor of Cord's trajectory, made when such tales felt genuinely tragic.
But Pre-code Hollywood is weird and sometimes dramatically clumsy. The pacing and editing belong to another era entirely.
Madame X1966
Lana Turner again, in another melodrama about secrets and sacrifice. The same DNA as Carpetbaggers—glossy, earnest, unashamed of its own sentiment.
But It's a women's picture in the old sense. If you want adventure and ambition rather than maternal anguish, it won't satisfy.
A Prophet2009
Both understand that the machinery of power and seduction functions the same way whether you're building an airline or controlling a prison block—the emotions are interchangeable, only the scenery changes.
A French prison drama about a young man building power through intelligence and ruthlessness from nothing. Same trajectory as Cord—accumulation, seduction, the realization that power isolates—but stripped of glamour and placed in a cell block instead of a studio lot.
But It's bleak. No spectacle, no elegance, just the cold mechanics of how ambition works when there's nothing left to want. Not escapism.
People
Cast
George PeppardJonas Cord Junior
Alan LaddNevada Smith
Carroll BakerRina Marlowe Cord
Robert CummingsDan Pierce
Martha HyerJennie Denton
Elizabeth AshleyMonica Winthrop
Lew AyresMac McAllister
Martin BalsamBernard B. Norman
Ralph TaegerBuzz Dalton- Archie MooreJedediah
Leif EricksonJonas Cord Sr.
Arthur FranzMorrissey
Directing
- Michael D. MooreAssistant Director
- Edward DmytrykDirector
Writing
- Harold RobbinsNovel
- John Michael HayesScreenplay
Production
- Joseph E. LevineProducer
Recommended by
Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge, Two Weeks in Another Town, Parrish, A Star Is Born, Doctors' Wives, The Betsy, Scandal Sheet