Barbarians on The Screen

A high-finance best seller comes to the tube with the greed and nastiness intact, and much of the drama too

IN THE SERVICE OF TRUTH AND BEAUty, mankind has attempted many seemingly impossible tasks down through the ages. Michelangelo transformed a bare ceiling into one of the most beautiful paintings in the world. Pablo Picasso fashioned a stunning work of art out of a pair of abandoned bicycle handlebars, and Marcel Duchamp achieved similar wonders with a cast-off urinal. Now the folks at Home Box Office have topped them all by making a reasonably watchable movie out of a book about a leveraged buyout: Barbarians at the Gate, which will receive its first showing on HBO this Saturday.

It helped that...

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