Americans love the Horatio Alger story--through pluck and hard work the lowly can become Ferrari drivers. Often erased is the importance of luck to these characters' success.
Allen plays on this in the context of Britain. There the luck of birth is so much more obvious than in the U.S. where everyone self-describes as middle class.
But the fortune of financial gain must sometimes be sustained by crushing others. Jack Lemmon's lesson in The Apartment is perhaps also that of our pockmarked billionaire hedge fund managers.
The definitive film on American gambling, and thus for our current financial crisis, is Altman's California Split with a similar surprise ending. Amid Elliot Gould's champagne popping eyes toward gluttony, George Segal's bewildering nauseous reply says it all: "I'm going home."
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