Top 10 movies about money and its perils
It's said that nothing is certain but death and taxes, that money can't buy happiness, that money is, in fact, the root of all evil. But none of that seems to stop us from wanting it, especially in these 10 movies where money — a lack of it or too much of it, illegally acquired and otherwise — causes trouble.
10. "Brewster's Millions" (1985, rated PG): Minor-league pitcher Monty Brewster (Richard Pryor) finds himself in the unlikeliest of high-concept scenarios when a distant relative, recently deceased, bequeaths him $300 million on the condition that he first manage to spend $30 million in 30 days without wasting it — and without telling anybody. The screwball high jinks get more desperate and clever as the deadline looms.
9. "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" (1936, not rated): Director Frank Capra goes full ah-shucks Americana with Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper), a tuba-playing greeting-card poet who suddenly finds himself in possession of $20 million. He's too good-hearted to grasp the greed that surrounds him like vultures, but a quick-witted journalist (Jean Arthur) shows him the ropes of human venality.
8. "The Wolf of Wall Street" (2013, rated R): Most of Martin Scorsese's films are, to some extent, about money, the lengths bad men go to get their hands on a lot of it, and the bad things they do once they have it. But none rivals the greed and excess on display in "Wolf," a dramatization of the rise and fall New York stockbroker Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio in one of his best performances). Some critics interpreted all the drugs, misogyny, abuse, theft and dwarf tossing as a celebration of entitled chauvinism, but nothing could be further from the truth — this is the closest Scorsese has come to directing a horror movie.
7. "A Simple Plan" (1998, rated R): Nothing ever good came out of stumbling over a bag of cash, especially not in this Sam Raimi-directed neo-noir thriller. Two brothers (Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton, whose relationship has a certain "Of Mice and Men" quality to it) and a friend happen across a plane crash in rural Minnesota — and $4.4 million in cash. The pact to keep the cash a secret is indeed simple, but you know what they say about the best laid plans of mice and men. Suspicion, greed and paranoia consume the men in a bitterly dark avalanche of snowballing horrors.
6. "Wall Street" (1987, rated R): Oliver Stone has made any number of movies that speak to his generation's historical, cultural and political experiences, often scathing critiques shouted through a megaphone: "JFK," "Platoon," "Born on the Fourth of July." But he captured the darkest side of his generation in an era of unparalleled greed with stockbrokers and corporate raiders Bud Fox (Martin Sheen) and Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas). Douglas' iconic, archetypal portrayal of excess, with his mantra of "Greed is good," earned him an Oscar.
5. "The Counterfeiters" (2007, rated R): What moral responsibility does a Jewish man bear for aiding the Nazi war effort for the sake of self-preservation? That's the impossible question posed in this Oscar-winning dramatization of Operation Bernhard, a Nazi scheme to flood the British economy with forged pound notes. An expert forger detained in a Nazi concentration camp agrees to work with a team of imprisoned counterfeiters, who potentially extend the war for the sake of their own safety.
4. "Trading Places" (1983, rated R): The social satire has held up well in this John Landis-directed comedy, in which a pair of old, rich owners of a commodities brokerage get bored and try to settle the argument of nature-vs.-nurture by swapping the lives of one of their privileged White employees, Louis Winthorpe III (Dan Aykroyd), with that of a poor Black street hustler, Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy). It's a tale as old as time, that of how one's socio-economic status doesn't make the man — but this time with gorilla-rape jokes.
3. "Double Indemnity" (1944, not rated): Few directors go as dark with as much glee as Billy Wilder, who practically set the standard of film noir with this wicked masterpiece hat further confirms it's rarely an augur of good things when a wife takes out a hefty insurance policy on her husband. Barbara Stanwyk plays the delectably conniving femme fatale who wants her husband dead, and Fred MacMurray her rube, an insurance man suckered into her scheme by something other than cash.
2. "There Will Be Blood" (2007, rated R): Did the 21st century peak early for filmmaking? Probably. Paul Thomas Anderson's primal story about America's Western expansion — and the greed, bloodshed and obsession that traveled with its prospectors — is something biblical in force. Old Testament, on account of Daniel Day-Lewis' performance as a rapacious oilman whose humanity is drained as steadily as the earth he trespasses.
1. "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948, not rated): Gold and greed have always made for fine bedfellows, and no one's hammered that point home onscreen more memorably than director/writer John Huston and Humphrey Bogart. Bogart plays one of three indigent Americans who take to Mexico to prospect for gold. They find lots of it, as well as the limits of human decency as Bogart's character descends into paranoid insanity.
Reach the reporter at barbara.vandenburgh@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8371. Twitter.com/BabsVan.