The story of one of the Gilded Age's most colorful figures, the multimillionaire Jim Fisk (Edward Arnold) and two of his fictional partners, Cary Grant, who is there to wind up with the girl (Frances Farmer) and Jack Oakie, who provides whatever laughs are left over after Arnold and Grant are finished howling with glee over their own twisted schemes to make a fortune.
It's a story with an ignoble message -- making scads of money by being ruthless, lying, treacherous, and philistine, is fun. Want to be happy? Keep your mind focused on being greedy. Well, it's not true. I've been ruthless, lying, treacherous, and philistine all my life and look where it's gotten me -- an abandoned railway car in the middle of the desert. Maybe I wasn't greedy enough. I've always regretted dropping that handful of pocket change into the kettle of a Santa Claus in New York. It was the tintinnabulation of his bells that got me. I've tried to make up for it by being as philistine as possible, papering my walls with Gustav Klimt posters, listening to Kenny G, but nothing works.
So if you're looking for philosophical advice, you won't find it in this movie. But if you're looking for a whiz-bang biography of a couple of guys amassing a fortune and laughing all the way to the bank until one of them winds up paying the piper, this may be it.
Rowland V. Lee's direction is nothing special but Edward Arnold practically embodied the sneaky rich guy of 1930s movies in such works as "Meet John Doe" and "Come And Get It." He's got the boisterous laugh of the self-satisfied, selfish, careless mogul down pat, although, to be honest, he looks like he should be running a butcher shop in Geldgierig-am-Rhein or someplace. I suppose Yorkville would do.
There was a burst of interest for some reason in biographies of famous men and women in the Great Depression of the 1930s and a lot of the subjects were self-made men, inventors, financiers, and the like. Maybe, at the time, they represented wish-fulfilling fantasies on the part of the audience -- pleasant dreams with a golden cast -- which would have been a big improvement over the cadaverous green of their everyday nightmares.
It's a story with an ignoble message -- making scads of money by being ruthless, lying, treacherous, and philistine, is fun. Want to be happy? Keep your mind focused on being greedy. Well, it's not true. I've been ruthless, lying, treacherous, and philistine all my life and look where it's gotten me -- an abandoned railway car in the middle of the desert. Maybe I wasn't greedy enough. I've always regretted dropping that handful of pocket change into the kettle of a Santa Claus in New York. It was the tintinnabulation of his bells that got me. I've tried to make up for it by being as philistine as possible, papering my walls with Gustav Klimt posters, listening to Kenny G, but nothing works.
So if you're looking for philosophical advice, you won't find it in this movie. But if you're looking for a whiz-bang biography of a couple of guys amassing a fortune and laughing all the way to the bank until one of them winds up paying the piper, this may be it.
Rowland V. Lee's direction is nothing special but Edward Arnold practically embodied the sneaky rich guy of 1930s movies in such works as "Meet John Doe" and "Come And Get It." He's got the boisterous laugh of the self-satisfied, selfish, careless mogul down pat, although, to be honest, he looks like he should be running a butcher shop in Geldgierig-am-Rhein or someplace. I suppose Yorkville would do.
There was a burst of interest for some reason in biographies of famous men and women in the Great Depression of the 1930s and a lot of the subjects were self-made men, inventors, financiers, and the like. Maybe, at the time, they represented wish-fulfilling fantasies on the part of the audience -- pleasant dreams with a golden cast -- which would have been a big improvement over the cadaverous green of their everyday nightmares.