The Luckiest Man in America: 80s Game Show Swindle Propels Hairy Fact-Based Drama

By Kim Hughes

Rating: B+

The new fact-based drama The Luckiest Man in America follows a seemingly regular schlub who, in 1984, summarily gamed a CBS television game show called Press Your Luck, winning a pile of cash while panicked showrunners scrambled to figure out how the heck he was doing it as the game — and the swindle — was unfolding.

Contrary to the film’s title, that winning schlub contestant — Michael Larson, an unemployed ice cream truck driver from Lebanon, Ohio — wasn’t lucky or especially brainy. He certainly wasn’t aspirational. Yet in a show where the average haul was around $10,000, Larson nabbed 11 times that amount, for a cool total of $110,000.

Larson had figured out that the “random” game board, which contained a series of tiles that awarded cash and prizes seeded amid other tiles that snatched the accumulated loot away, actually cycled through just five recurring patterns. Larson memorized the patterns in a scheme to avoid the bad “whammy” tiles and beat the game. (Ergo the once-ubiquitous catchphrase, “Big bucks, no whammies!”)

He brought that skill to bear during an entertaining-slash-fraught taping of Press Your Luck, craftily recreated here by writer-director Samir Oliveros and a terrific cast headed by Paul Walter Hauser (Richard Jewell) who marshals a wide-eyed smarminess somehow both contrary to the show’s greasy, faux-friendly Hollywood vibe yet very much in lockstep with it.

Larson’s sketchy nature debuts during his audition, where he pretends to be another contestant. First red flag. Thus discovered, he is quickly turfed from the proceedings. But something about his aw-shucks everyman demeanour resonates with show producer Bill Carruthers (David Strathairn) who invites Larson back the next day.

There, a hirsute and conspicuously not average Larson (suit jacket, tie, dress shoes and socks with... shorts?) sits between two more conventional contestants facing the burbling board and hoping to avoid the dreaded “whammy,” a vaguely sinister Tasmanian devil–type character.

Before anyone can say “crazy coincidence,” Larson is breaking records, assiduously avoiding whammies and amassing free spins and cash, a feat thought impossible. It’s hard to tell who is more villainous: Larson the savvy gamer or the hand-wringing TV execs who surreptitiously raid Larson’s truck and belongings hoping to unmask their winner while stemming the flow of cash he’s racking up.

Oliveros keeps the pressure high in his briskly running film that’s propelled by a bloopy, squelchy soundtrack and a volley between harried behind-the-scenes scenes and stage-managed on-set pieces. The script drops enough red herrings to keep everyone guessing about everyone else’s agendas, elevating an otherwise straightforward story.

Supporting players, including Walton Goggins as slick show host Peter Tomarken and Maisie Williams as frazzled page Sylvia, are committed, appropriately twitchy, and enormously watchable. And it’s often unclear what is real and fake in this cloistered environment where audience reactions are guided by prompters commanding “applause,” “boos” and “laughter.”

That Larson won “the most Vegas game in America” without technically cheating — a more vigorously random spin cycle would have easily thwarted him — offers a compelling moral grey area to a story underpinned by the fact that Press Your Luck, a game show purporting to want average folks to win big, turned out to be spectacularly inept in dealing with a success story, even a slyly manipulated one.

That is, until showrunners figured out a way of leveraging Larson’s big win to their own advantage. The psychology of it all is riveting. Somewhere, Gene Rayburn is howling.

The Luckiest Man in America. Directed by Samir Oliveros. Starring Paul Walter Hauser, Walton Goggins, David Strathairn, Maisie Williams and Shamier Anderson. In theatres April 4.