(FORTUNE Magazine) – The other night I went to a screening of the new version of The Manchurian Candidate, a timely and spine-tingling--if slightly jumbled--passion play of present-day political paranoia. I was pleasantly surprised to see a mockup of a FORTUNE cover featuring the mother-son antagonists, played by Liev Schreiber and Meryl Streep. I also noted that Manchurian Global, the company pulling the strings behind the scenes, is repeatedly described as a "private-equity fund." Which is odd, because there's no evidence that it's investing in startup companies. (What it resembles is a mutated combination of the Carlyle Group and Halliburton.) The screenwriters probably overheard someone whispering at a cocktail party something about a "secretive private-equity fund."

But it got me thinking about Hollywood and business. How has Tinseltown treated Wall Street and commerce over the decades? I decided to go back and look. Movies, of course, mirror society. And to the extent that Americans' feelings toward business and businesspeople have ebbed and flowed over the past century, so, too, have movies' portrayal of that world. Often bald attempts to simply adapt a business story into cinema fall flat. Recent made-for-TV movies like Martha, Inc.: The Story of Martha Stewart (with Cybill Shepherd!) and The Crooked E: The Unshredded Truth About Enron come to mind. Those movies were too transparent and probably not far enough removed from the actual events to truly resonate.

In its early days Hollywood appeared to have it in for business. In D.W. Griffith's A Corner in Wheat (1909), a nefarious speculator corners the wheat market, which makes the price of bread soar. The bad businessman gets his just reward by being trapped and then buried by cascading wheat in a grain silo. In Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Jimmy Stewart does battle against Lionel Barrymore's Mr. Potter--a paradigm for nasty bankers.

The triumph of the American economy in the 1950s tempered antibusiness sentiment. Movies like Executive Suite (1954) and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956) tried to show the complexity of our economy. A little later it even became okay to laugh at business, as in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967).

The 1970s brought a return of the businessman as no-goodnik. Morally bankrupt companies and crass commercial forces were often the foil of the forces of good. Examples here are Chinatown (1974), The China Syndrome (1979), and Silkwood (1983). Then the great macroeconomic cycle shifted--into bull market mode--and so, too, did the Hollywood prism. In Working Girl (1988), secretary Melanie Griffith outfoxes her snaky boss, Sigourney Weaver, head of the M&A department, and lands Harrison Ford to boot. Of course, we can't forget maybe the most famous movie about business ever made, Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987). (A FORTUNE cover was used in that movie too.) Some people think it was a smack at 1980s shenanigans, but that's not how I remember it. Gordon Gekko--Michael Douglas's Oscar--isn't so much evil as he is delectable! This film wasn't an indictment--it was a celebration.

I think we'll see more businessmen as bad guys. The business cycle has turned, of course, and someday somebody will make a great movie reflecting that. Filmmakers these days also run the risk of being branded politically incorrect if they use villains who have an identifiable ethnicity. Ergo, aliens, monsters, and space creatures are good candidates. Same with businesspeople. God help them, they have no Hollywood lobby. On the other hand, given the way some executives have behaved over the past few years, they might get what they deserve.

ANDY SERWER, editor at large of FORTUNE, can be reached at aserwer@fortunemail.com. Read him online in Street Life on fortune.com and watch him on CNN's American Morning and In the Money.