Poppins, Kong and the recession

By Steven McKenzie Highlands and Islands reporter, BBC Scotland news website

The film industry has frequently tackled financial crises

New films are poised to give their interpretations of the human and financial costs of the global downturn.

BBC Two will screen Freefall, a film about its impact on a raft of characters, this spring.

Former Bond girl Rosamund Pike and Girls Aloud singer Sarah Harding are among its cast.

Meanwhile, director Baz Luhrmann and American documentary maker Michael Moore have been linked with other projects.

But periods of economic troubles and the "good times" that have often preceded them have provided material for a host of movies, including blockbusters, children's favourites and monster horror.

Here, the BBC Scotland news website looks at flicks inspired directly, or set against a backdrop, of greed and monetary mayhem and the hardship that follows in its wake.

Disney's take on the PL Travers books about an English nanny is set in a London in 1910, where people can jump into chalk drawings on pavements and into a world of animated penguins waiting tables at a tea house.

In Mary Poppins, children spark a run on a bank

Actor David Tomlinson, who plays the bank employee father of the two children taken under Mary Poppins' wing, sings of confidence in the banks and scolds his son for wanting to waste a tuppence on a bag of bird food rather than invest it.

On a trip to their father's place of work, the children spark a run on the bank when they wrestle the tuppence from the grasp of the bank's decrepit owner and flee.

Customers who witness the scene believe the bank is refusing to give people their money and dash to the cash desks to demand their savings.

Tomlinson's Mr Banks is later summoned before his bosses and sent home in disgrace with his umbrella turned inside out, the red carnation adorning in his jacket pocket ripped apart and thrown away and a big fat hole punched through his bowler hat.

In the end a joke about a man with a wooden leg called Smith sees him made a partner at the bank.

Before Batman, actor Christian Bale played the amoral, brand name-obsessed and violent Wall Street worker Patrick Bateman in American Psycho.

Michael Douglas's Gordon Gekko said greed was good

The film - and the Brett Easton Ellis book of the same name - sees Bateman trying to get blood stains out of expensive designer suits and jealously competing with colleagues to have the most impressive business card - in between real or imagined acts of brutality.

Wall Street is also set in 1980s New York.

The movie starring Charlie Sheen is probably best known for Michael Douglas's "Greed is good, greed is right, greed works" speech made by his character, the successful but ruthless broker Gordon Gekko.

In the UK, the boom times and age of yuppies of the 1980s ended with recession in the early 1990s.

Ewan McGregor and Anna Friel have the lead roles in the film about Nick Leeson, the former trader whose �860m losses on Far Eastern markets brought down Barings - Britain's oldest merchant bank.

Mr Leeson, originally from Watford, Hertfordshire, spent four years in a Singaporean jail over dealings which led to the 233-year-old bank's collapse in 1995.

Anna Friel co-starred with Ewan McGregor in Rogue Trader

While not a huge hit with the critics, the film is relevant to the current financial troubles.

Last July, French bank Societe Generale was fined 4m euros (�3.2m) for allowing one of its staff to be in a position to operate as a rogue trader.

The French banking regulator pointed to "grave deficiencies" in SocGen's internal controls that allowed the losses, which cost the firm 4.9bn euros.

The losses were blamed on 31-year-old trader Jerome Kerviel, who denied doing anything wrong. He said the bank knew what he was doing.

Meanwhile, the profile of the 1999 film's stars has been rising.

McGregor went on to become Obi Wan Kenobi in the new Star Wars and Friel has been a hit as one of the stars of US sitcom Pushing Daisies.

The former rogue trader himself, Mr Leeson, has been sought as a commentator on today's economic turmoil.

Commenting on the credit crunch last October, he said the government and the Bank of England suffered from a "lack of understanding" of financial markets dating back over a decade.

Peter Jackson's 2005 remake of the classic and influential 1933 monster flick saw Depression-era New York brought to life with cutting edge movie technology.

The Depression did more damage to New York than Kong

But the Great Depression had wreaked havoc in the lives of the city's dwellers long before the CGI great ape arrives on the scene, trashing cars, climbing the Empire State Building and swatting fighter biplanes from the sky.

The Depression came in the wake of the Wall Street crash of October 1929 when shares fell sharply following a speculative boom.

The crash corresponded to a sharp decline in US economic output, which eventually spread around the world.

The US economy shrank by a third, unemployment reached 25% and the US banking system seized up.

Unemployment and financial uncertainty loom large in Kong.

Losing her job at a theatre, Naomi Watts' destitute Ann Darrow is caught stealing an apple and, in that moment, the attention of ambitious producer Carl Denham - played by Jack Black.

It all leads to a fateful journey to the mythical Skull Island where there are scrapes with terrifying islanders, dinosaurs, giant insects and the supersized gorilla.

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