This is an interesting movie which resists the easy temptation to paint Garfield as an avaricious vulture and Jorgenson as the saintly victim. It is even-handed in portraying both the cruelty that adaptation and changing times impose on people, and yet the necessity to do so. (Garfield: "I'm sure that the last buggy whip company in America made the best damn buggy whips in the world.") Jorgenson makes a moving and impassioned speech to the stockholders on the themes of caring and compassion, which completely wins the viewer over; no way do we feel that Garfield can respond, but he does, and very convincingly. One doesn't find this kind of ambiguity and even treatment very often; people like things black & white (e.g. Oliver Stone's "Wall Street"),which is perhaps why this film didn't make it big. I liked it. Danny DeVito is always worth watching, and Peck does a good job too. Unfortunately Penelope Ann Miller is not convincing in sultry mode.

I bought this used Video and waited months before bothering to see what I had expected to be a hackneyed stereotypical flick. What a delightful surprise. It is easy to produce a film that is pedantic, or to the other extreme, ridiculous- but to combine engaging characters, biting humor and realistic representation of economic forces is a rare feat.

You could study Shumpeter's "Economic theory of Creative Destruction of Obsolete Forms of Production," but you will not get a better illustration of the process than what is presented in this movie. DiVito portrayed the perfect balance of greed, and humanity as the Wall Street mogul. Penelope Ann Miller played the sharp, voluptious antaganist to perfection.

This film is a rare nugget of intelligent entertainment that stands out in the sea of juvenilia.

About halfway through this film, I would have said that Danny DeVito's character of Lawrence Garfield was running a better than even chance of becoming the second assassinated Garfield in American history. But in the end he becomes with all its and his defects, the great spokesman for American capitalism. In fact you have to go back to John Wayne's McLintock to hear the system so well defended.

DeVito is a Wall Street speculator who has earned the title of 'Larry the Liquidator' for his uncanny ability to spot in trouble companies take them over and liquidate them of all their tangible assets at a profit to himself and his investors. He's got his eyes on a company right now in the Rhode Island based New England Cable&Wire.

Running the company is Gregory Peck who is the son of the man who founded it and it's the typical employer in a one company small town. Peck is his usual decent man who feels a responsibility to the workers and to the town which would just go belly up should his plant close down.

Written fifty years ago and directed by Frank Capra, the film would have had the hero Peck triumphing over the evil gnome DeVito. Times have changed and the only way as William Holden so eloquently put it in Executive Suite for companies to survive is to grow. Research and keeping up with the latest technologies is the only way to go, a lesson Peck forgot. The Japanese have developed fiber optics, he's making a product for which there is less and less market.

And that is the weakness of the system in America in 2008. No provision for retraining workers is made in too many places. Still it's better than Communism where job competency is replaced by knowledge of ideological nostrums. On the other hand Communism does have its advantages as DeVito says. All the lawyers are the ones liquidated first.

Danny DeVito is an unpleasant looking man who is making people face some unpleasant truths. That's the strength of Other People's Money and why this is such a worthwhile film.