Trading Places (1983)

 

Off-List: Trading Places

The first Off-List movie of 1983 is “Trading Places”, a big childhood favourite of mine. I cannot tell how many times I have watched this over the years and while it may not hold up as well today as it did back then, it never fails to amuse me. This time I watched it with my wife and son and based on his reaction to it, this was his first viewing, it still works.

Randolph (Ralph Bellamy) and Mortimer (Don Ameche) Duke are wealthy commodity brokers (Duke & Duke). Stingy, prejudiced and arrogant, they have the kind of money where it does not matter what people think of them. In between their never ceasing pursuit of making money, they have an ongoing discussion on heritage vs. environment. Eventually they decide to conduct an experiment: They will send their star executive into the gutter, while picking a desperate type from the gutter and make him their executive. The value of the bet: 1$.

The star executive is Louis Winthorpe III (Dan Aykroyd), as arrogant and prejudiced as the Dukes and of “good breeding”. The gutter type is Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy), presently employed begging money pretending to be a crippled Vietnam veteran.

Louis takes really badly to having everything taken away from him. Without his status and his money, he is nothing and only with the help of the hooker Ophelia (Jamie Lee Curtis) does he stay afloat, sort of. Billy on the other hand eases into the role of commodity broker very easily. With the help of the butler, Coleman (Denholm Elliott), he is soon unrecognizable from the street thug he used to be. This lasts until he learns the truth about the bet (and that there is no-way the Dukes will have a black man leading their business). Now Billy, Louis, Ophelia and Coleman are on the warpath to take down the Dukes.

A modern take on The Prince and the Pauper tale, this is not a novel story, but in my poor opinion the best rendering of it ever done. It plays as a comedy, but except for some scenes on a train, it stays well inside the probable and makes us invested in the story. We are amazed with Billy, and although it is difficult not to feel a bit schadenfreude with Louis, we do feel with him as well. He is just so utterly helpless. Maybe Billy is a little too good a commodity broker for somebody picked up from the street, but explanation would be that street smarts is transferable into the commodity market.

The comedy is mostly slightly underplayed, with hints and asides and of course Murphy doing some of his idiosyncratic shenanigans. By today’s standard the comedy is way-underplayed, but my claim is that this is exactly why it works. The afore mentioned train sequence is the exception. Here we venture deep into silly comedy and according to the extra material the studio wanted to ditch this part. Thankfully, they did not. Silly as it is, it is also hilariously funny and comes at exactly the right point of the movie. Amazingly, after this intermezzo, the movie is able to jump straight back into probable land to provide us with a very satisfying and believable finale. That it is not free fantasy is reflected by the fact that today there is a law against insider trading known as “The Eddie Murphy rule”, based on “Trading Places”.

John Landis had a good streak at the time and “Trading Places” is definitely Landis classic. It is a good example of his type of movies. For Aykroyd, Murphy and Curtis, “Trading Places” was a huge boost to their careers, it is likely they would not have gone where they did without this movie and at least for me, this is the movie I associate all three of them with. I also love how the movie showcases Elliot, whom I mostly know from the Indiana Jone franchise, Ameche and Bellamy. All three belong to the old guard and they bring a lot to the movie. Don Ameche had not acted in a feature for a decade, but went on a roll after this one. I loved his role in Cocoon.

Yet, for all this, the greatest impact of “Trading Places” is the personal one it had for me. I loved it throughout the eighties and nineties, and it was one I always could take out if I wanted a good time and it still is.

Seriously, why was this movie not included on the List?