The original film of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three was quite representative of New York City in the mid-1970s. Tony Scott’s remake, which opens this weekend, doesn’t have that same sense of space, but even worse than its lack of local relevance is its out-of-date plot, which has John Travolta causing panic on Wall Street in order to make hundreds of millions in a stock scheme. Never mind that the economy is currently in such a state that the terrorist’s plan may be fruitless. Even before the recession this should have seemed antiquated. As David Edelstein writes in New York magazine, “Why would he need to do something so…so…1974 as hijacking a subway train to do what a lot of hedge-fund managers do before breakfast?”

The plot is also tremendously unoriginal, enough to assume Travolta’s character is a huge James Bond fan. But someone familiar with 007 villains, or any other would-be economic terrorists, would have to realize his own scheme would fail. To illustrate why it’s useless to attempt this kind of thing, we present you with ten classic films involving stock market scams, most of which are unsuccessful.


A Safe Investment (1915)

In this ironic short silent film from the comedy team of Mr. & Mrs. Sidney Drew (pictured above, though not in this film), a husband literally makes basketfuls of money from a crooked stock scam. The punchline: because he has kept the crime a secret from his wife, she finds the money and unknowingly invests it in that very stock.

The Toast of New York (1937)

This fictionalized biopic about infamous stockbroker Jim Fisk (played by Edward Arnold) includes the story of the Erie War, a battle for control of the Erie Railroad that saw Fisk, Jay Gould (who isn’t represented in the film) and Daniel Drew (Donald Meek) conspiring against Cornelius Vanderbilt (Clarence Kolb) by way of issuing counterfeit stocks. In real life, after a failed scheme to corner the gold market (which led to the financial panic of 1869), Fisk and Gould again manipulated the Erie stock in a betrayal against Drew, but soon afterward Fisk paid the ultimate price for his corrupt lifestyle when he was killed by a jealous business associate-turned-rival.

The Wheeler Dealers (1963)

Currently there’s not much to find funny in this spoof of Wall Street and Texan investors who try to scheme the market, especially not with James Garner’s nonchalant confession that his corrupt deals usually end up costing the taxman (and therefore, likely, the tax payer). But the movie is primarily a romantic comedy (Garner’s love interest is a stockbroker played by Lee Remick), and the seemed stock scam, involving the attempt to buy controlling share of an undervalued company, ends up being ruled legit, so the typically crooked Texan is a good guy?

Rollover (1981)

The scheme in this forgotten Alan J. Pakula thriller starring Jane Fonda has to do with the general world economy rather than the stock market specifically, but part of the Arabs’ plan to make American currency worthless by hording gold — and later by pulling money out of U.S. banks — affects Wall Street. There’s also something to do with the controlling interest in a chemical company, but the film’s plot is so confusing that we’re unclear as to how the exchange of stocks relates to the overall conspiracy. In any event, the Arabs’ dealings end up causing a financial crisis and panic, a calamity that paranoid Americans of the time likely believed possible. Of course, it’s a pretty dated scenario 28 years later, seeing as how we really don’t need foreigners to screw up our economy.

Wall Street (1987)

The most famous film to deal with stockbrokers and (as the title suggests, obviously) Wall Street, Oliver Stone’s decade-defining drama is all about stock scams, so much that it gives an entirely negative impression of the stock market, as if it is completely, all-around corrupt (we were certainly young and impressionable enough back then to believe this). First there’s insider trading, which was so common a term 20 years ago that in retrospect it does seem more normal than criminal. And then there’s the plan that Bud (Charlie Sheen) devises to downgrade a company’s stock so that Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) will sell his shares. Neither scheme is portrayed favorably, of course, and both characters wind up in prison.

The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)

Another ironic turn of events ruins the stock scam of Sidney J. Mussberger (Paul Newman) in theCoen Brothers’ charming tribute to Capra, Sturges and Hawks. The idea is for Hudsucker Industries to promote an idiot mailroom clerk (Tim Robbins) to company president in order to make their stock price go down. Too bad for Mussberger and the rest of the board of directors hoping to purchase the shares once they’re priced low, the naïve new proxy leader actually has some great ideas, and Hudsucker becomes more successful than ever before.

Boiler Room (2000)

Ben Younger’s underrated drama may owe a lot to Wall Street and Glengarry Glen Ross (both of which are alluded to in the film), but it’s an important story on its own for focusing on the fraudulent world of chop shop brokerage firms, which operate in “pump and dump” scams involving penny stocks. Unlike most of the schemes in this list, Boiler Room’s deals with creating demand for a stock rather than attempting to depress it. Like in Wall Street, the outcome for the crooked brokers is prison — or, in an alternate ending, death.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)

The Enron scandal included tons of corrupt accounting practices, most of which involved and/or affected the company’s stock. Through fraudulent claims of assets and profits that didn’t actually exist, executives pushed up the value of the company, and its shares. Later, when the stock was high, these executives sold their shares while the public and investors were being encouraged to buy. Eventually the truth about the company began to come out and the stock plummeted, causing stockholders to lose billions of dollars and, ultimately, executives to go to prison (or die first). This is, of course, putting the whole story simply, so check out the documentary for the full details.

Casino Royale (2006)

Bond villains have a tradition of attempts at economic terrorism, whether their plots involve manipulating the gold market, the diamond market, the silicon market, the heroin market, etc. In this reboot of the franchise, the market of choice is the stock market. Bad guy banker Le Chifre (Mads Mikkelson) plans to blow up a prototype plane so its airline’s stock value goes down, making him a huge profit through a stock-shorting scheme. Unfortunately for this villiain, 007 (Daniel Craig) foils the terrorist attack and Le Chifre then seeks to recoup the money he’s lost through a high-stakes poker game. Bond trumps him there, too, of course.

Live Free or Die Hard (2007)

Based on a screenplay inspired by a 1997 Wired article, the plot of this fourth Die Hard installment deals with “fire sale” cyber-terrorism, which includes an attack on the stock market, crashing it. At first the plan seems primarily anarchistic, but ultimately the movie’s Bond-appropriate villain (Timothy Olyphant) is revealed to be scamming the entire country in order to steal money by way of accessing social security numbers and bank accounts. Like most cinematic stock scams, it is foiled, courtesy of supercop John McClane (Bruce Willis).