Brewster's Millions (1985)

Walter Hill, a man who spent his career making westerns in disguise, once called this picture an aberration in the career line. He made it to improve his bank account. That candor is the most honest thing attached to Brewster's Millions, a 1985 comedy that takes George Barr McCutcheon's durable 1902 premise (spend thirty million in thirty days, inherit three hundred) and hands it to Richard Pryor, then asks him to keep his ribald humor tamped down. The result plays like a screwball comedy minus the screws, as Janet Maslin observed at the time, and the plot machinery grinds along with a fatuous artificiality that no amount of John Candy can grease.

The casting merits a moment of sober appraisal. A Black leading man, a Black female lead in Lonette McKee, an integrated supporting ensemble, all in a mainstream Universal comedy in 1985. The movie never remarks on any of it. Race exists here as payroll, not as subject. McKee's Angela is a paralegal who tracks the spending and ultimately saves the inheritance by exposing the bribed junior lawyer, a plot function performed with competence and no accompanying statement of purpose. Her competence is a mechanism, not a manifesto.

There is a faint whiff of class resentment in the treatment of the estate lawyers, Granville and Baxter, who scheme to keep the fortune from the man it was left to. The film does not push the thought any further. Its fantasy is inheritance, not redistribution. It wants the money to land in the right pocket, and the right pocket belongs to a genial minor league pitcher from Hackensack. No sermon follows. The picture never stops to instruct us on anything, which in an era of feature-length position papers passes for restraint. It is a mild, tired, amiable thing, and it asks nothing of us but ninety minutes.