Movies
The Betsy
Laurence Olivier must have been drawn to this by the same force that impelled him to do Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for television. Again, he's Big Daddy, or actually Big Great-grand-daddy, the tyrant of a Detroit automobile empire. Speaking in an unidentifiable accent that sometimes, perhaps, is in the neighborhood of a drunken Swede, he's simply abominable. This elephantine saga probably seemed a bad job to director Daniel Petrie, but he couldn't have made any worse of it than in the heroine's twenty-first birthday deflowering scene, set in the romantic summerhouse, with the camera starting on her discarded gown (as a jumbo housefly crawls across it), then circling furtively around the naked couple and peering at them discreetly through plants and flowers, and then the girl contentedly murmuring, "I knew it would be like this." From the novel by Harold Robbins; with Tommy Lee Jones, Robert Duvall, Lesley-Anne Down, and Kathleen Beller. 1978.
Reader Rating:
MPAA Rating: R
