--- title: By The Numbers: 10 Memorable Movie Accountants description: At tax time approaches, TIME salutes our favorite big-screen number crunchers canonical: https://time.com/archive/7119329/by-the-numbers-10-memorable-movie-accountants/ author: Gary Susman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2013-04-08T09:45:29.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-16T05:44:57.095Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: By The Numbers: 10 Memorable Movie Accountants og:description: At tax time approaches, TIME salutes our favorite big-screen number crunchers og:url: https://time.com/archive/7119329/by-the-numbers-10-memorable-movie-accountants/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt2aecb2ca2b0261d1/698a8efadb298706a327151c/shawshank-e1365193802129.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: Tim Robbins In 'The Shawshank Redemption' og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: By The Numbers: 10 Memorable Movie Accountants twitter:description: At tax time approaches, TIME salutes our favorite big-screen number crunchers twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt2aecb2ca2b0261d1/698a8efadb298706a327151c/shawshank-e1365193802129.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # By The Numbers: 10 Memorable Movie Accountants > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [Gary Susman](https://time.com/author/gary-susman/) Apr 8, 2013 9:45 AM UTC  Getty Images by [Gary Susman](https://time.com/author/gary-susman/) Apr 8, 2013 9:45 AM UTC At tax time approaches, TIME salutes our favorite big-screen number crunchers ## The Producers 
Leo Bloom



Broadway baron Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) is already an expert at bilking old ladies, but it takes his new partner, numbers whiz Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder, pictured here standing behind Mostel), to come up with a truly grand scam: get investors to pony up for a guaranteed flop, then pocket the money when the show closes after one night. Sure, the idea backfires spectacularly, with Springtime for Hitler becoming a camp hit that has Bialystock's little old ladies demanding returns on their investment, but for a while, at least, the milquetoasty Bloom gets to live out his dream of being a glamorous Broadway producer.



Besides, we bet there have been more than a few real Broadway bigwigs over the last 45 years who've wondered if Bloom's scheme from the 1968 movie might actually work, given a properly awful play. (Yes, we know there was a 2005 movie version, with the polished Matthew Broderick reprising his Broadway role as Bloom, but for sheer manic desperation channeled into brief glory, we'll go with goggle-eyed, electric-haired Gene Wilder in the original.) niennunb ## The Untouchables 
Oscar Wallace



Accountants don't usually get to carry shotguns on the job, but that's a perk that comes with being one of the Untouchables, as Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith, pictured, on the far right) finds out when Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) recruits him onto his team of incorruptible G-men enforcing Prohibition. In David Mamet's screenplay, being an accountant is both exciting and dangerous; after all, the movie's big climactic set piece (the one director Brian De Palma lifted from the famed "Odessa Steps" sequence of The Battleship Potemkin) involves the Untouchables' interception and capture of a fugitive Mob accountant.



Oscar himself discovers just how dangerous his line of work is when Al Capone's men ambush him in an elevator. Still, before his heroic martyrdom, he's the one who comes up with the brilliant (and ultimately effective) idea of prosecuting Capone for the prosaic crime of tax evasion. Give credit to Smith, who, after playing the nerd who gets the girl in American Graffiti, specialized in making dweebiness look adventurous. niennunb ## The Shawshank Redemption 
Andy Dufresne



One way to keep yourself from being assaulted in prison: befriend the guards by doing their tax returns. That's what convicted murderer Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) does in The Shawshank Redemption. Soon, he's using his knowledge of tax law loopholes and other accounting tricks to help the warden graft money and hide it off the books. As Andy notes with bemused bitterness, he'd been an honest man on the outside, but prison had made him a crook.



Andy's only real miscalculation is to make himself indispensable to the greedy warden, who goes to shocking lengths to prevent evidence that Andy was framed for killing his wife from seeing the light of day. But that's also the warden's greatest miscalculation, as he discovers after Andy escapes, empties the off-book accounts, and implicates the warden for all his crimes. Andy finds a haven on the beach in Zihuantanejo, which may be a great place to build a boat, but it's also a decent tax shelter. niennunb ## Night Shift 
Chuck Lumley



No accountant played by Henry Winkler could be a total nerd. Sure, Chuck Lumley starts out that way, bullied out of the financial industry into a dead-end job at the city morgue, bullied out of sex by his neurotic fiancee, even bullied out of getting the sandwich he wants by the local deli delivery guy. But when self-proclaimed "idea man" Bill Blazejowski (Michael Keaton) becomes his co-worker, the two hit upon an unlikely scheme — making the morgue the center of a call-girl operation – that gives Chuck a sudden influx of self-confidence and swagger.



Even so, there's a nice side to his machismo, as the accountant becomes the most enlightened pimp ever – helping his employees invest their money wisely and even giving them a company health plan. Unfortunately, the competition and the law make the business short-lived, but still, Chuck has set a good example. Will Ferrell's Allen Gamble in 2010's The Other Guys (a pimp-turned-NYPD accountant) owes a debt of influence both to Chuck and to Oscar Wallace in The Untouchables. niennunb ## Midnight Run 
Jonathan "The Duke" Mardukas



Mob bookkeeper "The Duke" Mardukas (Charles Grodin) has an even more adventurous life than Al Capone's fugitive number-cruncher in The Untouchables. Like that accountant, the Duke is on the lam, carrying with him the ledgers that would help the feds send his bosses up the river. He's also embezzled $15 million from them. But the Duke proves to be a wily trickster, much to the consternation of everyone who pursues him, and especially to Jack Walsh (Robert De Niro), the bounty hunter who finds him first and tries to haul him from New York to Los Angeles to serve as a state witness.



The odd-couple chemistry between the earthy Jack and the uptight Duke is the humor engine that drives this road-trip classic. Grodin would play another fussy accountant a few years later in Dave, an ordinary bookkeeper who gets some satiric mileage out of trying to help Kevin Kline's acting president balance the federal budget, but it's the Duke who remains the actor's most fully realized comic creation. niennunb ## Ledger Domain 
Accountants are heroes, and not just because they save the rest of us money at tax time. In the movies, at least, accountants often live lives of valor, action, and excitement.



On screen, we've seen accountants lead pirate raids, plot prison breaks, fall passionately in love, serve as pimps and Broadway producers, fight off the undead, and save lives.



Here are ten of the big screen's most swashbuckling bookkeepers ever to find glory beyond the spreadsheet. niennunb ## Ghostbusters 
Louis Tully



Louis Tully (Rick Moranis) is another nerdy accountant who gets the gorgeous girl, even if both have to be possessed by demons to make the coupling take place. In Louis' case, the possession comes just in time to enliven the dull party he's throwing at his apartment (well, that's what kind of party you get when you invite clients instead of friends, for tax purposes). Moranis is hilariously, hopelessly dweeby, both before and after he becomes the Keymaster of Gozer, and the sight gag of his liplock with the Gatekeeper (the equally otherworldly Sigourney Weaver) is one of the 1984 movie's more impressive spectacles.



Louis returns in the 1989 sequel, free of demons but still alluring to secretary Janine Melnitz (Annie Potts). Again, he plays a small role in helping the actual 'busters (Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson) save New York City (and the world) from spiritual apocalypse. Sometimes, it just helps to be in the wrong place at the right time. niennunb ## Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life 
The Crimson Permanent Assurance



In the featurette that precedes the movie, the Permanent Assurance is a middling insurance firm whose number-crunchers are old-timers who appear chained to their desks like galley slaves. But then, mutiny breaks out, and soon, the galley slaves become cutlass-wielding buccaneers, raiding rival firms and wreaking financial havoc that leaves their foes hopelessly tangled in tickertape and unspooled adding-machine paper.



The whole thing is rather silly, playing like a live-action version of one of Terry Gilliam's interstitial cartoons during TV episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus. Still, there's something endearing about the old fogeys finding new youth and vigor as they ride the choppy waters of high finance. No wonder it's a relief when, at a low point late in The Meaning of Life, the Crimson pirates from the earlier short invade the main feature. niennunb ## Moonstruck 
Loretta Castorini



Accountant Loretta (Cher) has a dull but safe job keeping the books for various local businesses (including her aunt's Italian grocery), as well as a dull but safe home (she lives with her parents in a well-appointed townhouse in Brooklyn Heights), and a dull but safe fiancé (mama's boy Danny Aiello). But she throws caution to the wind when she meets her fiance's tempestuous, opera-loving brother (Nicolas Cage).



Soon, she's risking everything dull and safe for a few moments of passion with the fiery-tempered baker, but she blossoms in the process, washing the gray streaks out of her hair and buying a party dress worthy of Cinderella. She's so besotted that she forgets to make the daily bank deposit for her aunt. All turns out well, but not before Loretta and her loved ones drink a champagne toast to family, to love, and to the crazy and foolish things that both make you do. niennunb ## Schindler’s List 
Itzhak Stern



One of the monstrous paradoxes of the Holocaust is that the Nazis, in many cases, kept meticulous records, as if history would ultimately vindicate the atrocities they documented, or as if well-kept columns of names and figures could impose some framework of sense and logic upon all the horror. But as Schindler's List showed, that obsessive mania for ledger-keeping worked both ways. German industrialist Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) hires accountant Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) to impose some financial sense on a business built on collaboration, black-marketeering, and slave labor.



But soon, he's helping Schindler compile the list of Krakow ghetto residents he needs to staff his factory, a list that both men know could save those named on it from almost certain death. Schindler will sacrifice nearly all he has to add names to the list, but it's Stern who's as much an architect of the list as Schindler. And, in Steven Spielberg's reckoning, it's also Stern who gets to give absolution to Schindler for not sacrificing even more to lengthen the list. In writing down those 1,100 names, Schindler and Stern had done more than most to impose sense on the senselessness. niennunb ## The Royal Tenenbaums 
Henry Sherman



The Tenenbaum may be a family full of accomplished members, but it's Henry Sherman (Danny Glover), who seeks to marry into the family, who may be the most accomplished of all. An accountant who's written a book on personal finance, he's also raised a son who (in contrast to the three grown Tenenbaum children) seems perfectly happy and well-adjusted. Plus, Henry can hold his own in a squabble, as he proves when his fiancee Etheline's (Anjelica Huston) ex-husband, Royal (Gene Hackman) tries to pick a fight with him using arcane racial slurs.



Still, it's endearing to watch him falter in the one area where he feels less than secure, in his awkward courtship of Etheline, who has her pick of accomplished men to choose from. That she picks Henry speaks both to her own good judgment and his quiet decency. (Had she married someone like him initially, instead of flamboyant blowhard Royal, her kids might have turned out happier, though the movie wouldn't be nearly as much fun.) And if all that weren't enough to recommend him, he has a goatee like Kofi Annan's. How cool is that? niennunb ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7119329/by-the-numbers-10-memorable-movie-accountants/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7119329/by-the-numbers-10-memorable-movie-accountants/"},"headline":"By The Numbers: 10 Memorable Movie Accountants","datePublished":"2013-04-08T09:45:29.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-16T05:44:57.095Z","description":"At tax time approaches, TIME salutes our favorite big-screen number crunchers","url":"https://time.com/archive/7119329/by-the-numbers-10-memorable-movie-accountants/","keywords":["Ghostbusters","cher"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt2aecb2ca2b0261d1/698a8efadb298706a327151c/shawshank-e1365193802129.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Gary Susman","url":"https://time.com/author/gary-susman/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt2aecb2ca2b0261d1/698a8efadb298706a327151c/shawshank-e1365193802129.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Tim Robbins In 'The Shawshank Redemption'","caption":"","creditText":"Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/archive/7119329/by-the-numbers-10-memorable-movie-accountants/","name":"By The Numbers: 10 Memorable Movie Accountants"}}]}] ```