TV Reviews : A Charming, Enlightening Look at ‘Crash of 1929’

It’s easy to be bullish about “The Crash of 1929,” an “American Experience” documentary airing tonight at 9 on Channels 28 and 15.

A look at a time of seemingly endless prosperity and its rapid, inglorious finish, the program is a charming hour of newsreel footage, film clips and interviews with present-day descendants of some of the most notorious figures of the day.

Like a bemused, still-in-wonder-at-it-all Greek chorus, the interviewees frame the show as well as illuminate it. “The pools (a small group of investors who controlled a stock) were a little like musical chairs,” says Michael Nesbitt, grandson of Michael J. Meehan, one of the era’s prime stock manipulators. “When the music stopped, somebody owned the stocks--and those were the sufferers.”

The suffering was universal. Everyone from janitors to heiresses played the market, all hoping for a big score. Oddly enough, as “Crash” makes clear, most felt that the market was being manipulated. But they didn’t care; they wanted to be in on the ride and hoped that they played it as well as the money men.

“Crash” is full of choice anecdotes, ranging from an indignant Al Capone complaining about “crooked guys” in the stock market to a clip from 1929’s “Cocoanuts” of Groucho Marx selling Florida swampland in much the same way that worthless stocks were trumped up and sold. The kicker: Despite his satirical prescience, Groucho was hopelessly addicted to the market and lost all his money in the crash.

The stock market of the ‘20s was not a level playing field: There was no regulation, insider trading was common, and journalists at all the major newspapers were on the take (there is a great shot of canceled checks that had been used to buy off newsmen). Economist John Kenneth Galbraith says there’s “nothing unique about this. It is something which happens every 20 or 30 years. . . . It’s about the length of time that it requires for a new set of suckers. . . .”