In his Wall Street aerie, Larry stokes up with doughnuts and swings into action. But his prey will not roll over. The cable company’s chief, Jorgy (Gregory Peck), a silver-haired icon of rock-solid New England values, dispatches his champion, Kate (Penelope Ann Miller), a young lawyer who’s the daughter of his long-time mistress Bea (Piper Laurie). When Larry sees Kat he bristles like a hedgehog in heat: he wants the company, he wants Kate, he wants doughnuts. DeVito is like a guy composed entirely of taste buds. What he really loves, he tells Kate, is “the game. Make as much as you can for as long as you can. Whoever has the most when he dies wins.”
The climactic scene is a proxy fight in which the stockholders must choose between Larry’s hardball tactics, which will make them money but kill off the company, and Jorgy’s ethos (“Whatever happened to people serving one another?”). The movie is like a Frank Capra film in reverse, in which nice-guy idealism is no longer certain of carrying the day against a cold calculus of self-interest. In Capra’s day all the fun was with Mr. Deeds and John Doe; here it’s Larry the Liquidator, with his appalling but riveting eat-’em-up energy, who’s the vital center. Larry has so much high voltage, and DeVito is such a master of grotesque extravagance, that the battle is unequal. This makes it tough on the actors who have to play virtue-Peck’s sweet but inflexible rectitude makes him a sitting duck; Piper Laurie looks as if she had more fun playing the depraved Catherine in “Twin Peaks” than the self-sacrificing Bea. The youthful Miller (costumed brilliantly by Theoni V. Aldredge as a woman warrior in the corridors of male power) is fresh and spunky, but she doesn’t yet pack the guns to be a totally convincing opponent for the likes of Larry.
Alvin Sargent’s screenplay deftly expands Jerry Sterner’s hit off-Broadway play; he adds new ironies, including a double-switch ending that uses the ploys of techno-finance. (Sargent has also, believe it or not, muted some of Larry’s scatological talk. And in these days of PC, he’s changed Larry’s name from Garfinkle to Garfield.) Aside from DeVito, the movie has more stolidity than style under Norman Jewison’s direction. But as long as DeVito is on screen, “Other People’s Money” is a bracingly scathing comedy about our time of the carnivores.
