Brewster's Millions

Montgomery Brewster is a minor-league baseball player nearing the end of his career when he learns that an eccentric, wealthy relative he never knew has died and left him an enormous fortune. The inheritance comes with a condition: to receive the full sum, Brewster must first spend a smaller fortune within a single month, ending up with nothing to show for it, and he is forbidden from explaining to anyone why he is suddenly throwing money away. The terms also bar him from acquiring lasting property, and the film follows his increasingly inventive efforts to shed the money while keeping his reasons secret.

Walter Hill directed this 1985 American comedy, the eighth of the twenty-two films he has directed in chronological order, following Streets of Fire and preceding Crossroads. The screenplay is by Herschel Weingrod and Timothy Harris, and Joel Silver and Lawrence Gordon produced. Richard Pryor stars as Brewster, with John Candy as Spike Nolan, Lonette McKee as Angela Drake, Stephen Collins as Warren Cox, Jerry Orbach as Charley Pegler and Pat Hingle as Edward Roundfield. The credited cast runs to seventy-two names.

Made for about twenty million dollars, the film took roughly forty-six million worldwide. On IMDb it holds 6.5 from around 47,000 votes, and on TMDB 6.6 from just under 700. A critics' rating of 5 out of 10 across twenty-three reviews places it below the audience scores.