Take heart, taxpayers. With April 15 upon us, video offers one way to ameliorate the pain of watching your earnings plunge down the IRS abyss. Here are some outstanding videos that make something entertaining — and often aesthetic — out of losing your money.
SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS (1941, MCA/Universal)
While most of us would do
just about anything to maintain our financial security, Joel McCrea
chooses to go broke in this film. He plays a successful Hollywood
director of light comedies (best known for Ants in Your Pants of
1939) who wants to make a serious movie about suffering and despair.
The problem is he's never suffered, so he dresses like a hobo and
goes out to find suffering, eventually becoming lost and penniless
for real. One of screenwriter-director Preston Sturges' best films,
this seriocomedy shows that laughter itself is one of the greatest
treasures. A+
THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948, MGM/UA)
Here's a neat variation on the going-broke theme: The main characters in this
picture (portrayed by Humphrey Bogart, Tim Holt, and Walter Huston, whose son John directed and wrote the script) start out broke, find a fortune, then go broke again. In the end, The Treasure of the
Sierra Madre is a persuasive parable about the mercurial power of
riches. A+
THE ROARING TWENTIES (1939, MGM/UA)
Let's not forget that
criminals have their economic hardships, too. In The Roaring Twenties, Prohibition is good to racketeer James Cagney till his
bootlegging empire falls under the crash of '29 and the remorseless
villainy of Humphrey Bogart. In the vintage Warner Bros. tradition,
Cagney's rise and fall gets a snappy, engrossing treatment. A
SWING TIME (1936, Turner)
Look: Even Fred Astaire can lose his
money, though never his class. In the beginning of this lilting
musical, he gambles away his fortune and is forced to ride a freight
train (in top hat and tails, of course) to New York City, so he can
try making a comeback. The message: Getting cleaned out isn't so
bad — you can always go meet Ginger Rogers and dance to some great
Jerome Kern. A-
LOST IN AMERICA (1985, Warner)
Albert Brooks and Julie Hagerty get
fed up with New York success and set out in a Winnebago to become
cross-country nomads — '' just like Easy Rider,'' as Brooks keeps saying. But their neohippie dream becomes a yuppie nightmare when Hagerty
loses their entire ''nest egg'' in a fit of gambling in Vegas. The film
is incisive and hilarious, thanks to cowriter-director Brooks'
finely tuned instinct for the comic quirks of human nature. A-
A NEW LEAF (1971, Paramount) When he discovers he's spent all his inheritance, shameless playboy Walter Matthau sets out to marry for money. He ends up with the world's richest goofball, heiress Elaine May (who also wrote the screenplay and directed). The two stars make a weirdly sweet team in this clever comedy about two people who manage to amount to something despite themselves. A-
