Bye, cell

A movie could hardly hope for better publicity. Rogue Trader, a film depicting Nick Leeson's part in the downfall of Barings bank and starring Ewan McGregor, is to hit British cinema screens just one week before Leeson's release from prison.

The film - adapted from Leeson's book of the same name and produced by Sir David Frost - will screen from June 25, while Leeson leaves his Singapore jail on July 3.

Leeson achieved notoriety as the trader who broke Barings, the world's oldest merchant bank. Before his arrest in March 1995, he ran up losses of #850 million on the Far East financial markets. Work began on a film of Leeson's life after Frost visited him in a Frankfurt jail. "It was plain as a pikestaff that this was a wonderful story", the producer commented. The project sparked controversy, however, first over payments made to Leeson for the rights to his autobiography, then on location in Singapore, where SIMEX {Singapore's International Monetary Exchange} felt threatened and misrepresented by the film. Leeson was diagnosed as having cancer of the colon in August 1998. Doctors gave him a 70% chance of surviving the next five years following surgery. The film of his experiences was completed a year ago, but has since struggled to find a distributor. In the US, it is to debut not in cinemas but on the Home Box Office TV channel. Its passage to a UK release has been eased by the Singapore authorities' decision to free Leeson early - his six-and-a-half year sentence has been reduced due to good behaviour not ill health. The film barely lives up to the furore, although it will please its own hero. McGregor's Leeson is motivated purely by wide-boy bravado and a fear of letting his superiors down. His well- intentioned, if ill-advised, gambling is allowed to spiral not only because banking on this scale is institutionalised skullduggery but because the reticence of Barings' archetypally English hierarchy persistently lets him off the hook. Class is the film's big issue. Deardon stresses Leeson's barrow- boy oafishness - this rogue trader can't find Jakarta on a map, and when he gets there, appals the locals by flashing his backside in bars. But the director's eagerness to establish Leeson's vulgarity is undermined by the irrepressible McGregor, who's too charming to convince as a banker or a boor, too keen and twinkling to be white trash. At least the star's appeal absolves Deardon's heavy-handed effort to humanise the economics. At one point, Leeson elucidates an arcane nugget of jargon to that trusty audience surrogate, the secretary; when she's absent, he conveniently speaks to himself. But neither Dearden nor McGregor succeed in creating drama from what ought to be nerve-jangling scenes at SIMEX. The movie soars when the rogue is rumbled. Leeson's Prittstick- and-scissors fraud now found out, he jettisons the mobile-phone and flees Asia. Within seconds of Anna Friel's hapless Lisa Leeson asking Nick, "do you think you'll lose your job?", the fugitive's face adorns the world's front pages. The incredulous couple simply giggle; the incredulous audience gape. The real-life story is the star here, so it's appropriate that Rogue Trader's success is being staked on its real-life hero's return to the public eye. Rogue Trader is released across the UK on June 25. Nick Leeson is released from jail in Singapore on July 3

Copyright 1999
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.