When Kate’s mother tries to buy him off with her million-dollar trust fund, he tells her in all seriousness, “I don’t take money from widows or orphans. Unsentimental about business, this hard-nosed son of the Bronx is a romantic about life, an excruciatingly earnest violinist, and an idealist about capitalism. Larry has already regaled us with his love of money, but we begin to see, right along with Kate, that there is a great deal more to the barbarian than mere greed. This is a movie, not a learned treatise about the agency problem, so naturally there is romance afoot. “You can’t do that.”ĭetermined to fend off this barbarian at the factory gates, Jorgy turn to his stepdaughter, a sharp young lawyer named Kate Sullivan (Penelope Ann Miller). “You can’t come into my town, my plant, take my company,” he thunders when Larry turns up in his limousine. But Andrew “Jorgy” Jorgenson (Gregory Peck), the son of the founder, still runs the place, and he has a lot of old-fashioned ideas about community and continuity and commitment. Played with delicious irreverence-and flawless sensitivity-by Danny DeVito, Garfield intends to buy up the depressed stock and unlock the value in the land holdings and other assets by selling them off, even if it wipes out all the jobs at the cable-and-wire division. Battered by imports and sustained only by its subsidiaries, the enterprise is worth more dead than alive, its stock down more than 80% from its position a decade earlier. Larry (full name, Lawrence Garfield) is a corporate raider who wakes up one morning to discover a tempting target on his screen: New England Wire and Cable, a venerable industrial concern with loyal employees, no debt, and persistent losses. But it will make you remember Larry the Liquidator. It won’t make you forget Peter Drucker or Tom Peters or even Karl Marx. In the history of business, there is no better-or more deceptively breezy-exposition of this age-old conflict between agents and owners than the 1991 film Other People’s Money, based on Jerry Sterner’s witty play of the same name. The problem is that the boss typically isn’t the one who owns the joint.
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