Cinema: Gas Guzzler

THE BETSY

Directed by Daniel Petrie

Screenplay by William Bast and Walter Bernstein

As 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 (Robert Duvall), who loves cars less than the balance sheet, his mistress more than his wife, and is an all-around blue meanie.

But 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. For a delicious moment or two later on, it looks as if the ever fit Angelo might also make it with the younger Hardeman’s estranged wife.

The 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.

Of course, everything works out in the end. Angelo gets control of both Betsy and the Betsy, which goes into production despite various corporate shenanigans.

The women, who have been so miser ably treated throughout, are banished from sight, and all the macho figures are left chortling over their victories.

In 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 of energy worth exploring. That, of course, is the libido. If the auto people in The Betsy could bottle that, they could power their products from here to the millennium and back on it.

—R.S.