Russell Brand as Arthur soaks up the view through gold binoculars. Other man toys include robots, cars and a highball. (Barry Wetcher)
Helen Mirren as Hobson surrounded by hard-partying layabouts, a herd of teeny elephants and a near lifesize violet camel. (Barry Wetcher)
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He lives in a luxury Upper East Side penthouse tricked out with a $1.5 million bed and a regulation boxing ring. He guzzles pricey Scotch. He drives a fleet of exotic cars, including the DeLorean from “Back to the Future.” He has a motorized hanger full of so many suits, he probably never wears the same thing twice.
America, meet your newest cinematic hero, Arthur Bach.
This guy is so disgustingly rich that, if he actually existed, he could be a second-year associate at Goldman.
“Arthur,” opening Friday, stars Russell Brand as the drunken, spoiled heir to a corporate fortune who wants to dump his well-bred fiancée (Jennifer Garner) in favor of a plucky regular girl from Queens (Greta Gerwig), who lives by the elevated subway tracks and gives illegal tours for money.
It’s a remake of the 1981 comedy that featured Dudley Moore as Arthur and John Gielgud as his long-suffering butler, Hobson. The film was a huge hit, raking in nearly $100 million domestically and turning Moore into a full-on superstar. (He garnered an Oscar nod, Gielgud won Best Supporting Actor.)
But the original was made at a different time — back when alcoholism was still funny. But more important, at a time before the gap between rich and poor truly exploded. In 1980, the average CEO earned 42 times the average worker, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. In 2009, the multiplier had skyrocketed to 263.
So what are we, the unwashed masses, to make of Arthur at a time when populist anger at fat cats and robber-barons is at its frothiest level in decades? A time when rebels in the Middle East are attempting to topple the despots who robbed their country’s treasuries to buy private planes or, in Hosni Mubarak’s case, gallons of hair dye?
Only in movies and on TV shows do the rich have any hope of remaining likeable and sympathetic. Last year’s “Eat Pray Love” asked audiences to root for someone who was trying to spiritually center herself by eating pizza while on vacation in Rome for weeks. Our country’s most popular cinematic superhero, Iron Man, is a hard-drinking womanizer who made billions in the weapons trade.
And then there is TV’s “Secret Millionaire” and “Undercover Boss,” in which seven-figure earners profess to learn important life lessons by deigning to do a regular job for a few hours. The horror!
The poster for “Arthur” seemingly attempts to head off any ill will, proclaiming, “Meet the world’s only loveable billionaire.” Sorry, Mark Zuckerberg.
“We didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it,” says “Arthur” screenwriter Peter Baynham of the current backlash against the rich. “When I wrote the original treatment, I had a line about the recession in there, but we tried to make the movie about a guy who was from that [wealthy] world, but he doesn’t belong in that world. He’s a pampered rich guy, but he’s also a nice guy who doesn’t judge people.”
Baynham says he thought of Arthur as being moneyed like Pierce Brosnan in “The Thomas Crown Affair” or Richard Gere in “Pretty Woman.” “Then you add that to someone who’s incredibly funny and foolish and throws money around,” he says. “You can have empathy for someone like that.”
Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture, doesn’t think audiences will hold Arthur’s wealth against him.
“He’s not behaving like you see those guys on CNN who are getting indicted,” he says. “There are times when the rich are seen as lovable. Arthur is rich, but he’s not lording it over others, and with his hedonistic lifestyle, he’s actually spreading money around.”
Another producer, Kevin McCormick, says that stories about fat cats with problems — be it “Coming to America” or “The Toy” — are a Hollywood staple because they help audiences take their minds off real troubles.
“If you look at some of the best movies Hollywood ever made, they were done in the 1930s at the height of the Depression,” McCormick says. “There’s something very diverting about it.”
The reason audiences may never fully turn against the gold-plated toilet set, on-screen or in real life, is because super-rich lifestyles are aspirational. “Don’t you wish you were Arthur?” the trailer for the 1981 original asked.
Well, yes. Minus the liver damage. Americans believed then, and probably still believe in spite of the data, that if they work hard enough, they might one day afford a fancy top hat and Rolls-Royce like Dudley Moore. Arthur, or the “Secret Millionaire” for that matter, could be any of us.
Arthur’s like a metaphor for America, says Megan Lewis, a professor of theater and film at the University of Minnesota.
“Arthur is like a boy who never grows up,” she says. “And America is known as the teenager to the rest of the world. It doesn’t have the history of Europe, for example. And like a teenager, America is often narcissistic, pleasure-seeking and irrational.”
Which is perhaps why audiences were so upset with the 1981 film’s original ending. In it, Arthur gives up his entire fortune (a laughable-by-today’s-standards $750 million) to be with the woman he loves. An angry test crowd nearly rioted over this plot point, forcing director Steve Gordon to quickly shoot an alternate in which Arthur remains flush.
Now we wait to judge this new Arthur by the financial yardstick that matters most in Hollywood: box office receipts.
reed.tucker@nypost.com