Love & Money R

Byron Levin (Ray Sharkey) has two sides. One is Byron the workaday L.A. banker quick to defend a harassed co-worker. The other is a pent-up employee who'll say something outrageous to a stranger for shock effect. Increasingly, Byron's risk-taking nature takes hold. And it becomes a stranglehold when Byron is seduced by the deadly allure of Love and Money in this tantalizing thriller from James Toback (The Pick-up Artist, Bugsy). Byron accepts a million-dollar deal with a global silver magnate (Klaus Kinski). His reason says no but his passions say yes: he's begun an illicit affair with the tycoon's exotic wife (Ornella Muti). In return, he must persuade a former college roommate, now a Latin American strongman (Armand Assante), to stop nationalizing the silver mines. And if words fail him, bullets will do.

James Toback wrote and directed this typically intense and idiosyncratic satiric thriller. Byron Levin (Ray Sharkey) is an investment planner who has grown tired of his job and is bored by his relationship with his girlfriend Vicky (Susan Heldfond). When Frederick Stockheinz (Klaus Kinski), an international business magnate, approaches Byron about helping him establish a new firm in a small South American nation, he gladly accepts the offer. It isn't long before Byron discovers that he's gotten involved in something far more complicated than he ever imagined. The country has rich reserves of silver, but it is also in a state of political upheaval, and Byron is dealing with dictators and fending off revolutionaries as often as he minds the bottom line. Byron also encounters Frederick's wife Catherine (Ornella Muti), a beautiful woman with whom he begins having a very dangerous affair. LOVE AND MONEY also features legendary director King Vidor in a small role as Byron's father; it was his first acting role in a film, and his last (he died nine months after the film's release).