Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #165 Brewster's Millions (1985)

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When I saw Walter Hill’s crowd-pleasing comedy Brewster’s Millions at a drive-in movie theater with my family as a nine year old back in 1985 I had no idea just how impressive its pedigree was. I knew star Richard Pryor primarily as a perpetually sad, embarrassed-seeming man who made broad comedies for children like The Toy and Superman III rather than arguably the most important and brilliant stand-up comedian of all time, a revered truth teller and homemade philosopher other comics speak of in hushed tones, as one of stand-up’s true masters. 

I knew John Candy as Tom Hanks’ crass sidekick from Splash rather than a comic genius whose work on SCTV revealed an astonishing level of depth and versatility he seldom got to showcase on film. 

Since I was a kid who loved movies rather than a cinephile I had no idea that Brewster’s Millions was directed by an auteur widely considered one of the greatest action filmmakers of all time in Walter Hill and produced by Joel Silver, the mogul behind some of the most beloved, influential and best loved action movies of the past forty years in 48 Hours, Commando, Lethal Weapon, Predator, Die Hard, Road House and The Matrix. 

All I knew was that Brewster’s Millions had a fiendishly clever, if plot hole-rich premise about a lovable everyman who must spend thirty million dollars over course of 30 days with nothing to show for it at the end in order to inherit 300 million dollars from an eccentric great-uncle as well as some gags so solid they remain lodged in my head thirty-six years later. 

Silver and Hill were far from the first filmmakers to see cinematic possibilities in George Barr McCutcheon’s 1902 comic novel. McCutcheon’s trusty warhorse inspired a 1906 Broadway play of the same name and later a 1951 musical, Zip Goes a Million before being adapted for the silent screen in 1914 by Cecil B. DeMille and Oscar Apfel in an adaptation that is unfortunately considered lost for the ages.

Brewster’s Millions was adapted twice more for silent films in 1921, with Fatty Arbuckle in the lead and a distaff 1926 adaptation called Miss Brewsters Millions and for sound in 1935, 1945 and 1961, when Sidney J. Furie directed an English version entitled Three on a Spree. 

Hill’s Brewster’s Millions seems equally inspired by the blockbuster success of a comedy of a more recent vintage in 1983’s Trading Places, which helped cement the superstardom of Hill’s 48 Hours breakout star Eddie Murphy and was written by Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod, the writing team behind Brewster’s Millions. 

Like Trading Places, Brewster’s Millions is about a street-smart black man of modest means but big ambitions who is afforded an opportunity to live the moneyed high life as a strange social experiment perpetrated by warped, demented old white men. 

In Brewster’s Millions the street-smart black man is Monty Brewster (Pryor), a sad-eyed pitcher still chasing his dream of major league stardom despite being well into his thirties and playing for a minor league team (The Hackensack Bulls) so small-time that they have to take a break every time a train barrels through the outfield of their ballpark.

Once upon a time Monty pitched for the Chicago Cubs and even though his time as a big leaguer was undoubtedly brief and undistinguished he nevertheless wears his old major league uniform to bars to impress women and remind himself of better days. 

Then Monty discovers that he had a very rich, very ornery white uncle played by a delightfully malicious Hume Cronyn who leaves him his vast fortune of 300 million dollars on the grounds that he spend 30 million dollars in thirty days in a way that leaves him with no assets. 

The idea is to simultaneously punish and reward the younger man, to teach him a lesson about the value of money by forcing him to spend so much so quickly that it will hopefully make him sick of wasting money. The offer comes with all sorts of conditions, perhaps most notably that he can’t tell anyone, even Spike Nolan (Candy), his hilariously crass catcher and wingman.

Monty also can’t tell Angela Drake (Lonette McKee), the beautiful paralegal assigned to oversees his accounting that he develops romantic feelings towards despite her being engaged to Warren Cox (disgraced character actor Stephen Collins), who she describes as a “sincere feminist” but who is actually a sniveling worm trying to sabotage Monty at the behest of his evil bosses.  

Through no fault of her own, McKee is stuck in a thankless role that requires her to be clueless and naive and more than a little dense and also doesn’t give her anything in the manner of comic business, funny dialogue or jokes. And because she works with our lovable everyman hero in a professional capacity, his romantic overtures have a distinct whiff of sexual harassment. 

Monty goes from zero to hero, from dreamer cursed to never realize his poignant, unattainable ambitions to a big timer whose flashy, free-spending ways the media finds a source of endless fascination during what I can only assume is a VERY slow news month. 

Because he throws around money so freely, Monty becomes a pied piper followed everywhere by a coterie of overpaid employees, hangers-on and opportunists, including Rick Moranis (who worked with Hill the year before in Streets of Fire) in a hilariously cameo as Morty King, the self-professed king of the mimics whose act involves imitating everything that he sees and hears, a shtick as funny as it is infuriating. 

Harris and Weingrod’s inventive script conjures up some clever ways to separate Monty from his abundant unearned cash. For example, Monty uses one of the rarest and most expensive stamps in the world as postage to send a mocking postcard to the heavies enforcing the peculiar terms of his uncle’s will.

But nothing wastes vast sums of money quicker and more purely than politics. So in a Being There-light development, Monty decides to enter the political arena with an absurdist mayoral non-campaign where he encourages voters disillusioned by sub-par mayoral candidates to pointlessly register their frustration by voting “None of the above.” 

Monty’s insistence that politics are stupid, and politicians suck, and there’s no point voting for anyone involved in politics, including himself, touches a chord with the masses, as do dadaist campaign posters vowing, “I’ll only make things worse! And that’s a promise.” 

Brewster’s Millions offers crowd-pleasing wish fulfillment as a lovable loser is elevated by a curious twist of fate to the rarified realm of winners and world-beaters and gets to live out his craziest materialist fantasies and help out other small-timers in the process. 

At first being an ostentatious multi-millionaire spending money for the sake of spending money is exciting and fun, like being Charlie Sheen in the 1980s. But it eventually proves exhausting, dispiriting and spiritually empty, like being Charlie Sheen during the ensuing decades. 

Brewster’s Millions has a weirdly abrupt ending where Monty wins the bet and then the credits roll but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I enjoyed it every bit as much at forty-four as I did as a nine-year old back in 1985. 

Pryor nails the comic and dramatic elements of his role. Even when he’s throwing around millions, Monty is still fundamentally a loser, a dreamer seemingly doomed to never come close to achieving his dreams. 

Pryor and Candy make for a winning team and Hill, in his only straight comedy, delivers a steady stream of laughs and gives the proceedings a darkness and working-class grit that mark it as a Walter Hill movie despite being a commercial mainstream comedy and consequently a decided change of pace.

It’s tough to beat Richard Pryor and John Candy with Walter Hill in the director’s chair and a script by the Trading Places screenwriters but re-watching Brewster’s Millions made me think a remake might be a good idea, or at least a commercial proposition.

After all, Brewster’s Millions has worked as a novel, Broadway play, musical, silent film, sound film, British film and Richard Pryor vehicle. It stands to reason that it would work smashingly as a Netflix original as well. 

Hell, Netflix just signed a big deal with Kevin Hart and if I were a cynical screenwriter I would see that as an excuse to pitch this with Hart in the lead and Josh Gad as his sidekick so that a whole new generation can experience one of the sturdier and more dependable premises in all of American comedy, and outside America as well, since Brewster’s Millions has been remade in Great Britain but also India repeatedly (1954’s Vaddante Dabbu, 1985’s Babai Abbai, 1988’s Maalamaal and 1997’s Arunachalam) as well as Brazil (2016’s Tô Ryca!) and China (2018’s Mr. Billionaire).

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