When “Speed Racer,” from Warner Brothers and the writer-directors Andy and Larry Wachowski, opens on May 9, it promises something old and something new. The old part is a plot device as ancient as moving pictures: an evil businessman who stands in the way of all that is good and right. The new part, based on various trailers and portions of the unfinished film, is, perhaps, a grudging acknowledgment of the wonders that big business has managed to create — for all its wicked ways. The big bad businessman has been a film archetype since before talkies. In 1917, the Triangle Distributing Corporation released a silent picture called “Greed,” in which a young couple, Adam and Eve, were led astray by a stock market schemer named Doc Denton. Mr. Denton wound up dead. Even at that early date, The Exhibitors Herald, a trade paper, called the plot line “tried and true.” Through the decades, diabolical business people have continued their ruthless reign. Some were memorable enough to make the American Film Institute's list of top movie villains of all time, including Mr. Potter from “It's a Wonderful Life,” Auric Goldfinger from “Goldfinger” and Gordon Gekko from “Wall Street.” In “Speed Racer,” the most obvious villains are Royalton Industries and its jowly, lip-curling chief executive Mr. Royalton, played by Roger Allam, who is best known for his role as a nattering media type in “V for Vendetta.” Make no mistake, Mr. Royalton is evil. “If you walk away from this deal, no matter how well you drive, you won't even finish the race,” he snarls at young Speed Racer (yes, that's his name), played by Emile Hirsch, in one of several trailers now posted on the Internet. But even at a glance, it is hard to escape a sense that the filmmakers are as dazzled as young Speed by the kind of world that only a digital-age, globe-spanning corporation could build. Look closely at the trailers, and you will find that the Wachowskis — who invented Royalton in adapting their movie from a Japanese animated television series about a young racer — dwell lovingly on the accouterments of a company in which the employees ride Segway-type personal transporters, the boss shows up in a purple Stealth-style jet, and sponsored drivers have whatever technology it takes to win. Could movie allegiances be changing, ever so slightly? Businesses and business people remain some of Hollywood's most reliable villains. But the next crop of corporate heavies appears to have something attractive in its villainy. Perhaps that means a long-overdue acceptance by movie makers that at least some of those who pump oil, sell stock, run airlines and build our increasingly fuel-efficient cars are not completely without value. Joel Silver, who joined the Wachowskis in producing “Speed Racer,” declined through spokesmen to be interviewed, as did the brothers. But theirs may not be the only spring-summer film to flirt with a more complex view of business villainy. In “Iron Man” - directed by Jon Favreau, Robert Downey Jr. plays a wealthy arms manufacturer, Tony Stark, who positively revels in the nickname “Merchant of Death.” Dangerously injured during a field test, he uses his technology to forge a new life as superhero, offering not just redemption, but also hope that a properly retooled businessman might save the world. In “Tropic Thunder,” a comedy directed by Ben Stiller and set for release by the Paramount unit DreamWorks in August, the nasty movie mogul portrayed by Tom Cruise (in the film, he gets a Forbes magazine cover) is not quite as bad as the gang of heroin processors who pursue the luckless band of actor-heroes. That could pass for progress in a storytelling medium that has been inclined to conflate business types and gangsters. (Witness the corporate counsel, played by Tilda Swinton, in “Michael Clayton”: she has a couple of hit men on call for the really tough cases.) “The Mafia is part of the entire corporate entity now,” Stanley Kramer, the producer and director of films like “Guess Who's Coming to Dinner,” once explained. He was thus quoted by Ben Stein in a 1979 study of entertainment industry attitudes, “The View From Sunset Boulevard: America as Brought to You by the People Who Make Television.” In truth, movie plots operate according to a self-contained value system that has only an occasional relationship with the real. In movie-think, media figures, at least lately, tend to be much worse than they really are. (One hopes.) Think of Meryl Streep as the nightmare magazine editor in “The Devil Wears Prada,” or Katie Holmes as the skunky reporter in “Thank You for Smoking.” Dumb slackers, by contrast, are basically good. So it will be in the coming “Pineapple Express,” about a couple of dope smokers on a tear; “Harold and Kumar Escape From Guant?namo Bay,” also about a couple of dope smokers on a tear; and “Step Brothers,” about a couple of feckless middle-aged men who get stuck with each other when their parents marry. But those who produce things or manage wealth have almost always been the worst. “People have a general aversion to big companies,” said the screenwriter Alfred Gough, who, with his writing partner Miles Millar, shares credits on such films as “Spider-Man 2” and “Herbie Fully Loaded.” As Mr. Gough sees it, the business villain in movies simply reflects a David-and-Goliath thing, pitting the individual against an evil organization. “In the '70s, you had the government, before that, the Communists, and before that, I guess, the Nazis,” said Mr. Gough, who as co-creator of the “Smallville” television series structured the pilot episode around the arrival in an idyllic town of the wicked LuthorCorp (which has its own Warner-maintained Web site). Business heroes in the movies are rare, and often problematical. Howard Hughes, in “The Aviator,” wound up a recluse, and the eccentric car-builder Preston Tucker was done in, of course, by the business world in “Tucker: The Man and His Dream.” By Oscar season, Hollywood's essential horror at the business machine - epitomized last year by Daniel Day-Lewis's Oscar-winning performance as the oil-maddened entrepreneur of “There Will Be Blood” - will be once again at the fore. This time, for instance, Universal Pictures has an awards-season bet on “Flash of Genius,” a drama in which Greg Kinnear plays the engineer who invents the intermittent windshield wiper, only to be portrayed as being squashed by automotive giants. But, for the moment, keep an eye on the wizardry invented by that reformed captain of industry in “Iron Man,” and those shots of a little boy ogling a glowing treasure box full of candy, courtesy of Royalton Industries, in “Speed Racer.” You could almost believe that people behind some of the spring-summer movies are ready to give business another look. - NYT __
