Yonkers Joe

Here’s the Quicktime trailer.

Story: Good Guy does Bad Thing for Good Reason.

Some other examples:

In Guys & Dolls, heart-of-gold gambler Nathan Detroit plays a game of craps to save an orphanage, or something.

In Rain Man, pompous entrepreneur Tom Cruise uses his autistic brother to count cards in Vegas. Notice the casino scheme/retarded family member connection to Yonkers Joe.

Breaking Bad is about a high school chemistry teacher with leukemia, who becomes a meth cooker in order to provide for his wife and a son with cerebral palsy. Notice again the needy family member with a debilitating mental condition.

In The Trap, a nice engineer down on his luck due to the poor Serbian economy has to raise 30,000 euros to pay for an operation for his cute kid. A gangster offers him the money in exchange for the murder of a rival. He takes the deal, and heartache ensues. Note again the debilitated family member, the morally conflicted protagonist, and the larger conflict between loyalty to those most dear and allegiance to the rules that hold society together.

Can you think of any more?

Bonus anecdote: In my first screenwriting class, one of my classmates worked a mentally retarded character into her script because “a movie has a much better chance of getting nominated for something if there’s a ‘tard in it.”