'THE WHEELER DEALERS'......THE '63 WOLF OF WALL STREET.....

The Wheeler Dealers (1963)    BQ visitors, bless you all, know well our great affinity for 1960's cinema.......

                Not only is it the decade BQ became a seriously avid moviegoer, it's the calamitous era when massive shifts and upheavals in the culture and society collided with traditional Hollywood moviemaking........this clash of revolutionary change and Old Hollywood, still rooted in the 1930's, 40's and 50's was something to see, alright......

                And the resulting films were a sight to behold.........sometimes crazy, bizarre,wildly uneven........and at times, like "The Wheeler Dealers", a Nostradamus-like preview of coming attractions......

                  This film functions on multiple levels......like many 60's films, it attempts a cartoonishly exaggerated satire of big business, with a veritable army of reliable comedy actors hamming it up to the max......(similar to the gentle satire practiced by Al Capp in his 'Li'l Abner comic strip)

                   It hangs its jokes on the primary structure of a typical Doris Day-like romantic comedy......with a Texas wheeler-dealer Henry Tyroon (James Garner) romancing security analyst Molly Thatcher (Lee Remick) while he tries to hustle up the million he lost on his latest bone-dry oil well.  (one of the film's best gags.....the well sounds like a dying tubercular patient)

                    Molly, a savvy stocks 'n bonds wiz, has her own agenda........having hit the very low glass ceiling for 1960's Wall Street women, her boss, Bullard Bear (heh, heh, heh...Jim Backus) gives her a mission-impossible designed to end her career as an uppity girl exec......jump starting an ancient moribund company, Consolidated Widget.........(yes, you guessed the joke - nobody knows what a widget is....)

                    What's weird and fun here.........Garner's the actual sex object of the movie, frequently drooled over by Remick and whatever women he passes by.........Remick battles for workplace respect and equality against a horde of misogynistic, condescending buffoons....(at one point, a simpering Wall Street bigwig insults and degrades Remick and her fellow women security analysts, speaking to them like toddlers. When they stand up and ask him cold, hard questions, he flees in a shamed panic.)

                     Garner gives you a spot-on sneak preview of the kind of business bucaneering that led of all of the subsequent Wall Street crashes, especially the 2008 apocalypse........playing with other people's money like real-life monopoly, he's supremely confident he'll make a fortune and stiff the government for whatever losses occur if the deal goes south,,,,,

                     He's even got his very own kickstarter funding group, three loud drawling Texans (Chill Wills, Charles Watts , Phil Harris) who show up like a Three Stooges team of speculators.....(Watts and Wills look like they stepped right off the set of "Giant" where they played pretty much the same roles)  Little do any of these characters know that Garner's Tyroon the faux tycoon is a self-invented Boston-bred Yale graduate.......whose Texas twang is pure facade.....much like his deals......

                    You can have tons 'o fun watching this film dally with issues that still painfully ring true today. But it still remains mired in 60's comedy tropes........(the story takes time out for a standard Hollywood satirical swipe at modern art, complete with culture-vulture phonies mooning over abstract paintings created by equally phony 'artists', creating their canvases by riding on them with paint-splattered tricycles..... Naturally, the greedy Garner sees a chance to make another windfall from these hapless suckers)

                       Not to worry........everything (the convoluted business stuff, the budding romance) gets properly sorted out in a courtroom presided over by that Cranky Old Guy Of 1000 Movies, Charles Lane, much to the misery of the SEC bloodhound played by John Astin (who's earlier seen gazing out at Wall Street pedestrians, firing a make-believe machine gun......we kid you not)

                        BQ lives to re-discover movies like this.....3 stars (***) try it out and enjoy it on all its many levels........and one of the last major feature films that hit theaters only days before JFK's assassination in Dallas.......after that, you didn't see too many movies that used Texans for a source of comedy........