Wall Street (1987 film)

Wall Street was Oliver Stone's next film after the famous Platoon, released in 1987.

The story involves a young stock broker, Bud Fox (played by Charlie Sheen), who is desperate to get to "the top". He settles on a plan to become involved with his hero, the extremely successful businessman Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas).

After succeeding in meeting Gekko, Fox gives him a stock tip based on insider information he happened to come across while talking to his father, Carl (played by Martin Sheen). Carl represents the "old school" in the movie, a man who works hard and fair. Carl is a maintenance chief at a small airline and learns that they will soon be cleared of a safety concern after a previous crash.

Gekko uses the information to make a small profit when the stock jumps after the verdict on the crash is release. Fox quickly learns that this is the "secret" to Gekko's success -- insider information -- but the illegalities involved bother him only slightly as he is quickly admitted into Gekko's "inner circle". Fox quickly becomes very wealthy and gets all the perks -- the fancy apartment, the blonde, the cars.

However this changes when Gekko decides to do a corporate raid on Fox's father's company. At this point he must choose between the rich insider's lifestyle offered by working outside the law, or his traditional values of fair play and hard work. He chooses the later and uses a business rival to break the deal, being indited for insider traiding in the process. He gets his last revenge by turning state's evidence against Gekko, going to jail himself in the process.

Perhaps not the best of movies, it is nevertheless important in terms of reflecting the public's general mallese with the current state of affairs in the "big business" world at the time. Gekko clearly represents Donald Trump whose dealings were being reported on daily. Stone was not trying to point out illegal dealings, but to illustrate the corrupt lifestyle of everyone involved in the financial system, legal or no. The system values The Deal more than what the deal represented, people and goods, a system Stone apparently believes is without value.

Perhaps the most remembered scene in the movie is a speech by Gekko to a shareholders' meeting of Teldar Paper, a company he is mounting a takeover of. Stone uses this scene to give Gekko, and by extension, the Wall St. raiders he personifies, the chance to justify their actions, which he memorably does, pointing out the slothfulness and waste that corporate America accumulated through the postwar years and which he sees himself as a "liberator" from. His catchprase from the speech, "Greed is good", came to symbolise the ruthless, profit-obsessed, short-term corporate culture of the 1980's and 1990's and by extension became associated with the neoclassical, anti-union economic policies that made slash-and-burn capitalism possible.