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Although it’s not as much of a misquote as the persistent belief that Rick tells Sam to “play it again” in Casablanca, in Oliver Stone’s 1987 drama Wall Street, financier Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas) does not exactly utter the three words that start this column, during a speech to the stockholders of a company of which he is now the single largest shareholder. The full sentence runs as follows: “The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” He does go on to state that “greed is right”, “greed clarifies” and “greed works” but obviously those aren’t the parts that have become as iconic a 1980s sound bite as President Reagan’s admonishment to Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” uttered earlier that same year.

(An aside: Having made that comparison, I consider that there is an interesting parallel between the larger-than-life status both quotes have achieved, the former for the way it is now used in a VH1 I Love the ‘80s way to wink wink nudge nudge at precisely the sort of excess and lax morals that Wall Street - inspired by insider trading scandals in the mid-80s - railed against, and the latter for the way it has become part of the larger revisionist Reagan myth of our 40th president singlehandedly bringing an end to Communism in Eastern Europe - an argument well examined in Will Bunch’s recent book “Tear Down This Myth.”)

I have always been taken with that clause, “for lack of a better word.” Gekko, among his other qualities, is a smooth talker, able to sound polite, cultured, and jovial even while taking a metaphorical knife to an opponent, but he can also adjust himself as the occasion necessitates. Here, speaking before a large audience (as he also does during his first extended appearance in Money Never Sleeps) he becomes anecdotal and almost folksy, creating a vibe of us vs. them even though he is so squarely in the “them” that the irony becomes quite pungent.

But “greed is good” or more accurately “greed. . . is good” became the touchstone of a generation. And what is both interesting and frustrating about the return of Stone and Douglas to Gekko’s world 23 years later, a world in financial meltdown just like our own, is seeing how Gekko isn’t entirely the bad guy anymore. He has grown older, as have his creator and portrayer, and more than a little sentimental and the tension from the outside and within the storyline is the extent, if any, of Gekko’s rehabilitation. Is he a changed man? Does he value the bind of family ties more than the ability to make a quick billion?

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