Authors:
Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
June 2001 | Volume 52, Issue 4
Show Business
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
If the business of business is business, then it’s the business of Hollywood to be skeptical. At least about business. Virtually from the beginning, the movies have seen American business as an object of farce or satire at best or some vaguely defined evil at worst. From more than eight decades of filmmaking, one is hard put to name a handful of films that portray businessmen in a heroic or even nonpredatory way. One might suspect Hollywood of an antibusiness bias if not for the fact that the film industry’s view of labor is even darker. Here are 10 films (considering the Godfather pair as a unit) that reflect America’s ambivalence about its business sector:
The year of Bonnie and Clyde was the wrong one for a film version of this Pulitzer Prize-winning musical. The only thing young moviegoers wanted to know about business then was which one Benjamin Braddock must go into (“Plastics”). David Swift ll’s breezy satire remains largely unseen, even by TV audiences that later come to embrace its leading lady, Michele Lee. Robert Morse, singing “I Believe in You” to a mirror, set a standard for overachievers everywhere.
Nunnally Johnson’s hit film, adapted from a bestseller by Sloan Wilson III and starring Gregory Peck as an alienated businessman, has a favorable reputation it really doesn’t deserve. Though its title became a catch phrase to describe the mindset of Eisenhower-era corporate America, Peck is wooden, the message obvious, and the alienation alienating.
Or, as Al Pacino’s character might have called it, Death of a F-—n’ Salesman . In this case, the salesman who is dying, almost before our eyes, is Jack Lemmon, squirming and sweating through perhaps the best performance of his career. David Mamet’s adaptation of his own Pulitzer Prize-winning play about real estate salesmen is overpumped and unconvincing as a realistic look at the business—but it’s intoxicatingly nasty fun as a horror show about salesmen in hell.
Michael J. Fox, looking eerily like Robert Morse in How to Succeed , goes from the mailroom to the board of directors in practically no time at all, thanks to the real secret of his (and the movie’s) success, the tangy Margaret Whitton as Fox’s aunt (by marriage), wife of the chairman of the board, whom he is sleeping with. Great work if you can get it. The material, which may have been touched up by playwright Christopher Durang (who plays a small part), is silly on the surface and witty on the inside.