DIRECTOR: Daniel Petrie
From the Harold Robbins bestseller.
Loren Hardeman (Paul Ryan Rudd), the heir to Bethlehem Motors, is queer.
Loren kills himself – it is Harold Robbins!
Daniel Petrie—who directed A Raisin in the Sun with such quiet authority in 1961, and who later handled an extraordinarily difficult scene between young Kiefer Sutherland and Matthew Carriere in The Bay Boy with impeccable restraint—must have sold his soul for this piece of trash.
Imagine a film in which a gay man’s five‑year‑old child witnesses his father take his own life in a car. The distraught boy runs upstairs to find comfort from his mother (Katharine Ross), only to discover her in flagrante delicto with his grandfather, played by Sir Laurence Olivier.
It’s a grotesque collision of shock tactics and bad taste, the kind of sensationalism Petrie had always avoided. Coming from a director capable of such moral clarity and emotional intelligence, the result feels not just misjudged but almost surreal.
Paul Ryan Rudd, who played the gay character, was always billed as such and did not change his name when his more famous namesake, Paul Rudd, arrived with Clueless in 1995.
The Betsy, together with The Swarm, effectively ended Katherine Ross’s movie career in 1978. She had a ten-year run.
The Betsy was Harold Robbins’s favorite of all his book adaptations. Take that!
It’s a two-for: the death of “the fag” gets a big cheer, AND there is a second cheer when the boy arrives in mon’s bedroom.
Now streaming on Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video and YouTube
https://thebrownees.net/86-queer-films-made-under-the-hays-code-1934-1968/
https://thebrownees.net/106-queer-films-from-the-new-hollywood-1968-1980/
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