They say that money makes the world go round; it's certainly essential to film production. Yet filmmakers have often displayed a cautious attitude toward it, and Hollywood's explorations of the financial world have rarely been flattering. As Gordon Gecko returns to the screen to question whether greed really is good, we look at some of those who have gone before.
Executive Suite
Hollywood was never more critical of financial elites than during the early 1950s, when noir icon Barbara Stanwyck starred in a succession of films exploring issues around social climbing and corporate succession. Here William Holden is the idealistic young man being groomed for power by company executives who have no intention of letting him dictate their direction, while Stanwyck is the deceased boss' dangerous daughter.
Trading Places
Its premise is bizarre, its approach comic and playful, but there's a lot going on alongside the main plot of this 1983 hit. Eddie Murphy is the conman raised to a high powered financial position by two rich corporate traders making a bet. He soon discovers that the skills he needs to get by in high finance are not so very different from those he used on the street.
Rogue Trader
Based on the real life story of the man who ruined Britain's Barings Bank, this energetic yet cautionary tale stars Ewan McGregor as Nick Leeson, secretly breaking trading rules and effectively gambling with the bank's money, which is easy to hide at first, but gets trickier as the stakes get higher. McGregor would later play a similarly motivated though less successful young man in Woody Allen's black comedy Cassandra's Dream.
Barbarians At The Gate
HBO's first big feature film venture sees a bidding war turn nasty as executives fight for control of a major tobacco company. James Garner and Jonathan Pryce lock horns in a film notable for its intelligent, accessible presentation of the financial issues involved. It's loosely based on a true story and is underscored by a current of dark yet playful humour.
I Love You Philip Morris
This film is famous for taking a risk by casting Jim Carrey as a gay man, but in truth it was perhaps more daring in casting him as a rogue financier. After making himself rich through a series of small time swindles, Carrey's compulsive conman hero gets more ambitious and uses a string of false references to get a top accounting job. Once in position, he is able to embezzle a fortune. The film carefully balances its sympathies and highlights weaknesses in regulation.
Pi
How does a film about a mentally disintegrating mathematician fit into the world of high finance? Because manipulating numbers is at the heart of what enables stock market traders to make so much money, and as the fragile hero of this film pursues a mathematical theory of everything for its own sake, he is pursued by a shadowy cartel keen to use his gift for their own ends. The single mindedness of the traders is compared directly with religious fanaticism.
Wall Street
The original and still the best, Oliver Stone's devastating critique of the Eighties greed is good mentality won Michael Douglas a well deserved Oscar. As ruthless trader Gordon Gecko, Douglas summed up an era, yet it is Charlie Sheen's ambitious young stockbroker who is the moral core of the film, torn between the purity of devotion to money and an appreciation of the human cost of what he is doing, especially as his own father finds himself in the firing line.
