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1 How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, 1967.

The year of Bonnie and Clyde was the wrong one for a film version of this Pulitzer Prize-winning musical. The only thing young moviegoers wanted to know about business then was which one Benjamin Braddock must go into (“Plastics”). David Swift ll’s breezy satire remains largely unseen, even by TV audiences that later come to embrace its leading lady, Michele Lee. Robert Morse, singing “I Believe in You” to a mirror, set a standard for overachievers everywhere.

2 The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, 1956.

Nunnally Johnson’s hit film, adapted from a bestseller by Sloan Wilson III and starring Gregory Peck as an alienated businessman, has a favorable reputation it really doesn’t deserve. Though its title became a catch phrase to describe the mindset of Eisenhower-era corporate America, Peck is wooden, the message obvious, and the alienation alienating.

3 Glengarry Glen Ross, 1992.

Or, as Al Pacino’s character might have called it, Death of a F-—n’ Salesman . In this case, the salesman who is dying, almost before our eyes, is Jack Lemmon, squirming and sweating through perhaps the best performance of his career. David Mamet’s adaptation of his own Pulitzer Prize-winning play about real estate salesmen is overpumped and unconvincing as a realistic look at the business—but it’s intoxicatingly nasty fun as a horror show about salesmen in hell.

4 The Secret of My Success, 1987.

Michael J. Fox, looking eerily like Robert Morse in How to Succeed , goes from the mailroom to the board of directors in practically no time at all, thanks to the real secret of his (and the movie’s) success, the tangy Margaret Whitton as Fox’s aunt (by marriage), wife of the chairman of the board, whom he is sleeping with. Great work if you can get it. The material, which may have been touched up by playwright Christopher Durang (who plays a small part), is silly on the surface and witty on the inside.

5 Tucker: The Man and His Dream, 1988.

Rarity of rarities, a movie about a visionary American businessman! The keyword for Francis Ford Coppola’s bio-epic on the life of Preston Tucker, an automobile designer who challenged and almost succeeded in shaking the Big Three of the auto world, is enthusiasm, from Coppola’s ebullient directorial flourishes to Jeff Bridges’s lead performance. (Joan Allen, as his wife, strikes a more somber, realistic note. If she had handled the business end, Tucker might have succeeded.)

6 Save the Tiger, 1973.

Jack Lemmon, who seems to specialize in this kind of role, won an Oscar as a desperate and burnt-out garment salesman. Despite Lemmon’s on-the-edge performance—or perhaps because of it—the film was not a financial success. Three years later, director John G. Avildsen was to discover with his immensely successful prizefight epic Rocky that uplifting is better for business than depressing.

7 The Apartment, 1960.

One of two views of American business from Billy Wilder, this one cynical, the other (One, Two, Three) more cynical. The Apartment is the one with Jack Lemmon—who else?—as a guy trying to get a foothold on the corporate ladder who lends his superior, Fred MacMurray, a key to his quarters so he can carry on there with Shirley MacLaine. The film won the Oscar for best picture in 1961, but now it seems dated and predictable (particularly the romance between the two exploited workers, Lemmon and MacLaine).