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Barbarians at the GateRating:
Release Date: 03 February, 2004 Retail Price: $9.97 OUR Price: $9.97 You SAVE: $0.00! Cast: Complete Cast (8 total) |
Barbarians at the Gate Reviews
accurate and fun
Comically captures the 80s zeitgeist while exposing the logistics of MBO's/LBO's better than most business school texts. Highly recommended.
Wall Street wackiness
The 1980s were a time of unparalleled corporate greed, or so the media told us then and now. You had a bunch of workaholic young executives known as "Yuppies" pounding the pavement in New York making complete fools out of themselves. Why? Because many of these dolts were the same ijits involved in the flower power movement a few years before. You simply must hand it to the Baby Boomers--never has a generation taken so much from so many and given back so little to so few. By the time the 1980s rolled around, many of these cads turned up their sleeves and went about changing the corporate world. Thanks a lot. Largely due to the efforts of this generation, we all have to jump through a lot more hoops to get and hold a job. "Barbarians at the Gate" is a satirical look at just one aspect of the corruption the Boomers helped bring to the work world, namely the managed/leveraged buy out (...). Although several of the principals in the film look much older than the Boomers, don't be fooled. It was the total lack of morality of the post-war generation that helped fuel the greed of the 1980s.
This made for HBO film--one of the best the channel ever created by the way--stars James Garner as Nabisco/RJR chief executive officer F. Ross Johnson. This is a guy who is a born salesman, as the beginning of the film shows us when we see a youthful Johnson selling photography sessions door to door. By the time he has grown up, he's running one of the biggest corporations in America, selling cookies and smokes to people around the world. In fact, Johnson's latest brainchild is the creation of a smokeless cigarette that promises to revolutionize the industry. The possibility of huge profits from the new venture leads Johnson to make an offhand comment about buying the company so he can hold on to most of the profits. Little does he know how easy it is to accomplish this goal. His friends put him on to a fellow named Henry Kravitz (Jonathan Pryce), a corporate raider known for his skills in buying up companies and turning huge profits in the process. Johnson meets with Henry, but doesn't care for the guy that much. For one thing, Kravitz is a bit on the cold side whereas Ross is everyone's witty friend. Worse, the Nabisco executive gets the feeling that Henry won't let him run the company the way he sees fit, i.e. maintaining a huge fleet of corporate jets and posh expense accounts.
Ross Johnson decides to go ahead with his leveraged buy out without Kravitz at the helm. He contacts his old friend Jim Robinson (Jim Thompson) over at American Express, who in turn brings in hotshot financial whiz Peter Cohen (Peter Riegert) from the firm of Shearson Lehman to help finance the deal. Robinson's ingratiating wife and public relations guru Linda (Joanna Cassidy) also lends a hand. All the principals must keep quiet about what they plan to do, though, because Kravitz and other sharks on Wall Street will jump into the fray if they get a whiff of Johnson's ambitious intentions. Of course, that's exactly what happens. Kravitz does discover the plan and makes it a personal crusade to force Johnson out of the picture. Henry considers himself the "Father of the LBO," and he's not about to let a bunch of upstarts steal his limelight. He's got his own hotshots willing to work night and day in order to present a better offer for RJR/Nabisco stock to the company's board. The majority of the film deals with the minutiae of back and forth backstabbing, blatant greed, under the table dealing, and assorted other highly unethical business practices. You'll be surprised to discover how suspenseful this film makes a leveraged buy out seem.
Rarely have I seen a film that so successfully balances a message with fantastic humor, great characters, and high suspense. The message, of course, is the unbridled greed of corporate America. Repeatedly, these characters plot and plan to make a boatload of the green stuff while everyone else suffers the consequences. Layoffs don't mean a thing to these people as long as they can fill their pockets. You should despise these people, and you will at times, but most of them possess endearing traits as well. Garner's depiction of Johnson steals the show in this respect. His witticisms, outbursts, and general grouchiness are hilarious to behold, with none other than the scene where he discovers the utter failure of his smokeless cigarette serving as proof of this assertion. "I need an extra set of lungs to take a drag of this thing" is the cleanest line I can mention from the exchange. Garner's just great, and the primary reason I have watched this film at least a dozen times since it came out in the early 1990s. His overpowering presence tends to overshadow the great performances put in by Jonathan Pryce, Jim Thompson, and Jeffrey DeMunn as one of Ross's underlings at Nabisco. David Rasche does a great job in the small but very funny role of Ted Forstmann, an investment banker seeking to carve out his own niche in Ross's deal.
I don't know what the problem is over at HBO, but they consistently release their films to DVD with few to no extras. At least "Barbarians at the Gate" comes with a widescreen picture transfer, something I can't say for several other HBO releases I have rented lately. If you love James Garner, or just adore films with a high entertainment value, you must check out this obscure little gem soon. Do it for no other reason than to blow raspberries at that darned Boomer immorality!
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