The Hypocrisy Of Douglas' Character

I got the new DVD release yesterday. I have to say I wasn't surprised with what I saw in terms of how the film neatly set up the straw man of "good" VP (Douglas) vs. "bad" VP (Plummer). What really amused me is how there was this less than subtle insistence on subverting the moral formula to give us in effect secular leftism's concept of good vs. evil in which Plummer is first established as a clean-living church-goer who doesn't drink or smoke but whose regard for profit over social activism is what makes him bad and why he will eventually be sent down the path to destruction.

Now by contrast, Douglas, the guy who believes the bank should invest in low income housing, we learn has been shacking up with crusading left-wing attorney Susan Flannery (a woman of limited talent and zero appeal. I never understood why Robert Wagner thought she was worth it in "The Towering Inferno" but I digress) because his wife is now in a catatonic state inside an asylum and he's afraid to divorce her because it might send her over the edge if she were to unexpectedly recover. Oh, right, as if waking up to the news he's been carrying on with Flannery isn't already going to do that! I was just struck by the hypocrisy in how this film treats the matter of marital infidelity. Evidently, it's okay to do it so long as (1) your mistress is a crusader for social justice and the "right" issues and (2) you've been driven into it becase hey, it's all your wife's fault for getting sick!

But what really amazes me is how Douglas, a guy who knows Federal law inside out to smell what's wrong with the deal Plummer lines up with a sleazy multi-national corporation, is so unsavvy on how his pushing for the bank to back a low-income housing high rise project that his crusading attorney mistress is deeply involved with, even to the point of mobilizing the angry tenants to disrupt banking business and trying to force the bank to do things their way (and never mind all the normal customers who were inconvenienced in the process) that the expression CONFLICT OF INTEREST never seems to occur to him or anyone else. I don't know about you, but if my bank decided to back a low yield project that could easily turn out to be inefficiently run and not a real benefit to the community (high rise projects like the kind Flannery is caught up in turned out to be things that made urban poverty worse) and I learned the VP's mistress is the attorney deeply tied to the project, I would bail out of that bank for the same reason I'd bail out as a result of Plummer's sleazy deal with the corporation.

"Moneychangers" is Hollywood's conception of good and evil at its narcissistic worse. Joan Collins is beautiful as the temptress who leads Plummer astray and Mancini's score is great, but otherwise this was a waste of five hours of my life (capped by the subplot involving Timothy Bottoms, who becomes the first ever victim of prison gang rape sodomy on network TV)