Wall Street

Wall Street (1987) is about a young broker getting close to an investor and trading on inside information. Bud Fox works at a small brokerage and is chasing Gordon Gekko. He calls fifty nine days running and finally gets into the office. He has one thing to offer: his father is a union representative at an airline and Bud knows something about the company that has not been made public. Gekko trades on it and takes him on. What follows is more information, more surveillance, more money. The turning point is his father's company. Gekko plans to buy it and break it up for sale, and only there does Bud understand what that means. Gekko's speech at a shareholders' meeting is the best known passage, and in it he says greed is good. Oliver Stone's father was a stockbroker and the film is dedicated to him. It was intended as a criticism and did the opposite. Over the years a great many people have said they went into finance because of this film, and Gekko was taken as a model rather than a warning. Both Stone and Michael Douglas have complained about it repeatedly. Douglas won best actor. Charlie Sheen and his actual father Martin Sheen play father and son in it. The trading scenes were shot on real floors. A sequel followed in 2010. It runs 126 minutes. Good for: finance, the eighties, and character drama. Less good for: it is dense with jargon and states its message too plainly.