The Wheeler Dealers (1963)

Best movie of this year hands down!

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

**this review contains spoilers** Finally got a chance to catch this movie on TCM the other day, and what a disappointment it was. I mean, this movie seemed like a slam-dunk from the description. James Garner, fresh from Maverick, playing a Texas oilman who isn't above a con or two. And Lee Remick, one of the most beautiful women in the movies, playing a stock analyst. Put 'em in one of those big, glossy Hollywood comedies they made in the early sixties, with all the wonderful character actors who were around at the time, like Jim Backus and Pat Harrington, and you have a heckuva package.So I always wondered why all the movie-review books gave it a mediocre rating.Well, now I know. This movie just doesn't make any sense. It's incoherent. Garner and Remick are immensely appealing, and I especially would have liked to have bumped into Remick on Wall Street in 1963, though if I had I wonder if I would have retained the power of speech, so gorgeous she was. But you know, to be successful, a movie needs more than actors. It also needs a storyline that works.This one? Well, it starts out with Garner drilling for oil in Texas, and hitting a dry hole. He discovers he and his company are broke and he needs to go to New York to raise some money. He has some leases that are about to expire.So he goes to Wall Street and immediately convinces three financiers to put up $300,000. That's all the money he asked them for. So is the problem solved? I dunno. The movie doesn't tell us.Then Garner goes to a brokerage and tries to sell the owner on buying stock in his company. Okay, so maybe that $300,000 didn't solve the problem. Who knows? Anyway, here he meets Lee Remick.She has another mission. She has to sell stock in a widget firm or else she'll be fired. She figures Garner is her mark. Okay, not a bad setup. Romance ensues, with all the usual complications.Here we start seeing the stuff that doesn't make sense. Garner buys a restaurant. I guess he wants to impress Remick. But he's broke, scrambling for cash. Huh? Then he hooks up with a painter, disappears for a week in Europe and starts buying up abstract paintings. I guess it's because he thinks Remick is into abstract art. There's some blather about how the whole thing is a tax dodge. He can make ten cents on the dollar by donating to museums. But again, he's broke, his company needs every dime. Huh? Three fellow Texans arrive on the scene, apparently so eager to invest in Garner's schemes that they flew after him to New York in their private jet. Does he pitch them on his drilling venture? No. He sells them on joining the painting scheme instead. Huh? There's a throwaway line in there somewhere, indicating that the Texans aren't keen on oil ventures. Okay, I'll grant the movie that -- it's a stab at logic -- but Garner never even tries to ask them for money. Here we are at the halfway point of the movie and this is the last time we even get a hint about his problems in Texas. This whole idea is abandoned. We never find out what happens to Garner's Texas drilling venture.Now we get into an entirely new storyline. Garner, for some unexplained reason, decides to run up the price of the widget company stock. What is the scheme? What is the con? I don't get it.Is Garner planning to purchase stock on the cheap, then resell it? The final scene of the movie belies that. He purchased four percent of the stock and his buddies purchased 48 percent, and all of them kept every penny. So it wasn't a swindle. Okay, fine. But why does he expend 20 minutes of comedic gyration on running up the price? Actually, the widget company stock sounds like a steal. Turns out the widget company is a holding company for AT&T stock, bought on the cheap befoie WWI, and the principals have been collecting fat dividends ever since. Why wouldn't Garner try to acquire a controlling interest as cheaply as possible? He could liquidate the widget company and make money by selling the AT&T stock. If this was the plan, that might make sense, but the movie owes it to viewers to explain it. And in this scenario it wouldn't make any sense for Garner to run up the price of the stock. Anyway, Garner doesn't even seem to recognize that the widget company has value. I just don't get it. Huh? And while this was playing out, I wanted to scream -- what about the Texas drilling venture? Anyway, all this is backdrop to the lovely romance between Garner and Remick, and it all culminates in a securities-fraud trial. The two of them do what they're supposed to, they're cute as heck and all that. But I say the "heart" part of the story doesn't work if the "head" part is a failure.

A good Sunday afternoon or late night distraction. You can pretty much figure out the entire storyline before it gets underway. If made by MGM we'd have seen this as a Doris Day/Rock Hudson vehicle. Almost as interesting for its take on the earliest beginnings on the (ahem) "career-girl" whose most shocking decision was to put career before marriage even when the marriage prospect was Texan James Garner at his most charming and chivalrous. Given Lee Remmick's modern day interest in feminism, this must be one film she's deeply embarrassed to have made. She did a good job - she did what she was told to do by either studio or director - she's disarming, charming, and feminine in Hollywood's best "we-don't-know-the-50's-have-ended-what-new-era?" style. The set dressing and costumes will make many a middle-aged person nostalgic for mom and the home they grew up in.Charming, dated fun. If you ever wondered what made Garner a star - here's your answer. Sean Connery's "it" factor without the dark undertones.

Good old fashioned comedy that exploits every classic cliche about Texas oilmen. After years playing Bret Maverick, James Garner has the fast-talking con man character down pat. Old timers Phil Harris, Chill Wills and Jim Backus form sort of a Greek chorus of old money Texans eager to see what the brash newcomer's next scam will be.All the fun is in the wheelin' and the dealin', Garner explains at one point. "Money's just a way of keeping score."

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).