Gregory Peck was best known for his role as Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird, the character at the top of the American Film Institute's 100 Years, 100 Heroes list. He's the quintessential tall, dashing, good guy.

Danny De Vito, on the other hand, is best known for his role as Louie De Palma, that most loathsome troll on the TV show Taxi. Not exactly the guy you'd want to bring home to mom.

Yet, here in Other People's Money, it's De Vito as Lawrence Garfield, the violin-serenading, poetry-reciting, Japanese-speaking, M&A master of the universe who is positioned in the right, a redemption of Gekko-era Wall Street, whose hostile takeover of the under-performing New England Wire & Cable Company of Rhode Island is ultimately accepted by the stockholders as the right thing to do.

And he's up against Peck's idealistic but naive Andrew Jorgenson, who's behind the times, unable to keep up, as his company is pulled out from under him. We want to like Jorgy, but he's just not getting it.

It'd have been too easy to root for Peck as Garfield, and against De Vito as Jorgy; in this reversal of type, we want to hate De Vito's Garfield, and we want to like Peck's Jorgy, but their characters - and, how these fine thespians played these characters - demand we get onside with De Vito.

Splendid!

Reminds me of another terrific casting against type - https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/11384-the-hard-way/discuss/58e98ca9925141351f02c885