Watch The Wheeler Dealers For Free

Simply A Masterpiece

Excellent adaptation.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Run of the mill comedy where transplanted Texan, Jim Garner, with southern drawl, seems to have the Midas touch in making money despite the fact that his oil wells have dried up, As a result, he goes to New York to try his hand at the stock market and meets female stock analyst Lee Remick.The good theme of the picture is that it deals with women in the work place, especially here at Wall Street. As her boss, Jim Backus wants to get rid of her so he assigns her to a dead end stock which hasn't been viable in years. Wait until you find out what the stock has been lined to. You know of course where this shall all lead to regarding the Garner and Remick characters. There is a fling for him at a restaurant and art gallery.As an art critic, Eliot Reid is wasted here but Garner's pals made up of Phil Harris and Chill Wills are funny here.

Wheeler Dealers is a very entertaining movie with Garner as a charming Texan who makes his money in shady deals and clever schemes, staying just this side of the law. Remick plays a stockbroker who is struggling to prove herself in a male dominated industry - it's one of these interesting examples of early feminism in movies; she is treated badly and is smart, but at the same time she basically ties her star to Garner (as do some men) rather than making her own way. Also note that in this period apparently even feminists referred to themselves as "girls." At times Wheeler Dealers approaches brilliance, with some great lines and a clever satire of finance on the highest levels, but unfortunately the movie is far too fond of sitcom-like plot twists and the ending feels rushed and unconvincing, as though the writers just ran out of ideas and decided to quickly dash something off. But the good outweighs the bad, and at its best this is a very funny movie, while at its worst it's still pretty cute.

I first saw Wheeler Dealers as a kid in the early 70s and was tickled by the broad comedy of the Texas oilmen scenes and excited by the raw capitalism. The movie got shown regularly for some reason over the next few years and became a favourite of my circle of friends. Only when I saw it much more recently did the prophetic nature of some of the situations strike me.For example, the absurd way the oilmen use and recycle their wealth seems more like the Houston boom days of the 70s than the early 60s. Tyroon is an early investor in Pollock-style modern art and predicts it will one day sell like old masters. When he dreams up the infamous Consolidated Widget scam (the movie helped popularize use of the word with reference to technology) the blind enthusiasm over satellite components could have been straight out of Nasdaq in the late 1990s. And the scene with Ms. Remick decrying the lot of women investment analysts with her peers is startlingly contemporary - indeed I have trouble believing all the female analysts on Wall St. could have filled a room in 1963!All of which is just to say, plus ca change - catch this anachronistic (in the good sense) gem of a movie if you ever get the chance.

I think that "Send Me No Flowers" is the best of these "Technicolor marvel" comedies from the 60's, but this is one of my favorites. (By "Technicolor marvel" I mean those films that were shot in primary colors even more intense than something like "The Adventures of Robin Hood", with unnaturally uniform lighting and sets and locations, but mostly sets, that are DisneyLand-clean-and-orderly. Doris Day seemed to be in about half of those movies, at least in my recollection.)The movie is about James Garner as an oil-man having a run of bad luck, so he goes to New York to make some quick money. He finds big bucks and romance, and it makes me laugh. The fact that Louis Nye plays a parody of Jackson Pollock, and that Phil Harris, Chill Wills, and Charles Watts act as a sort of Greek chorus to Garner will give you some idea of how inconsequentially silly this movie is. There's even a securities trial at the end (the judge makes a comment at the beginning that is just thrown away -- I missed it the first time I saw the movie -- which I laugh about every time I think of it).