It is hard to believe that it has been forty years since the release of Trading Places (1983), the comedy that asks the age-old question: Does heredity or environment determine our destiny?
Trading Places tells the story of two blue-blood stock market titans, Randolph and Mortimer Duke (Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche), who place a $1 wager to settle their longstanding argument about the nature/nurture question by literally swapping the lives of a black low-level street hustler (Eddie Murphy) with that of white snooty Ivy League banker (Dan Aykroyd). The film is considered a New Year’s Eve classic because its climactic scene takes place on a train on New Year’s Eve. Having garnered $90 million at the box office, it was considered a critical success. As film critic Roger Ebert wrote:
This is good comedy. It’s especially good because it doesn’t stop with sitcom manipulations of its idea, and it doesn’t go only for the obvious points about racial prejudice in America. Instead, it develops the quirks and peculiarities of its characters, so that they’re funny because of who they are.
Randolph firmly believes that we are all products of our environment and that anyone can succeed with the proper social advantages. Mortimer holds the opposite belief: that our life’s expectations are circumscribed by our biological makeup and the social station of our parents. The brothers decide to test their respective theories by pulling Billy Ray Valentine (Murphy) off the streets and setting him up in a beautiful home with a high-level job at their firm Duke & Duke. They simultaneously arrange for their Harvard-educated employee Louis Winthorpe III (Aykroyd) to be arrested for a phony drug charge and thrown out of his home (in which Valentine is now residing). Winthorpe tries desperately to obtain help from his Harvard friends and his fiancée, Penelope, but everyone turns their back on him because they believe the Duke brothers’ fabrication. (READ MORE from Leonora Cravotta: ’Tis the Season for Streaming Christmas Movies)
The film depicts Valentine’s natural street instincts as the perfect foundation for succeeding in the cut-throat world of high finance. Winthorpe, on the other hand, now stripped of his social status, job, financial resources, and home, starts descending into madness. The one bright spot in Winthorpe’s new life is Ophelia (Jamie Lee Curtis), a financially savvy prostitute who agrees to let Winthorpe live with her platonically with the understanding that he pay her $50,000 once he gets his old life back. Once Valentine and Winthorpe realize that the Dukes took advantage of them both to satisfy their petty curiosity, they join forces to outsmart them. The film ends with a hilarious finale in which the principals are traveling incognito on a New Year’s Eve train that is also transporting a gorilla.
Not surprisingly, Trading Places has been subjected to the political correctness mob of the present day. While the film is widely available for streaming, it is presented with a warning that it includes the word “blackface.” Aykroyd darkened his complexion for the train scene where he is pretending to be a Jamaican exchange student who has a hysterically funny exchange with Murphy, who is pretending to be an African exchange student.
In an interview with the Daily Beast earlier this year, Aykroyd defended the creative choice but acknowledged that it would never fly in today’s cultural climate:
Eddie and I were improvising there. Eddie is a Black man and his entourage were all Black people, and I don’t think they batted an eye. There was no objection then; nobody said anything. It was just a good comic beat that was truthful to the story….
I probably wouldn’t choose to do a blackface part, nor would I be allowed to do it. I probably wouldn’t be allowed to do a Jamaican accent, white face or Black.
The fact that the idea for the blackface scene emerged from an improvisation activity between Murphy and Aykroyd is probably ignored or downplayed by today’s social justice warriors. It is also important that we put a 40-year-old film into context. Since Trading Places’ release, we have had a black president, and we currently have a black female vice president. The world is a very different place than it was in 1983. Those who we refer to as the “elites” have also evolved, and not necessarily for the better. The film’s reference to Winthorpe’s Harvard pedigree seems almost satirical now, given that the Cambridge institution, along with the University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has passively condoned anti-Semitic rhetoric. Furthermore, the current president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, has been accused of plagiarism. (READ MORE: Harvard Students Question Presidential Selection Process Amid Claudine Gay Plagiarism Scandal)
Trading Places remains a brilliant piece of comedy and social commentary. It is also a tale of good triumphing over evil. The film’s continuing appeal is largely due to the excellent writing and to the comedic mastery of Murphy and Aykroyd, along with the first-rate performances of Bellamy, Ameche, and Curtis. It’s credited with catapulting Eddie Murphy to stardom, raising Dan Aykroyd’s profile, and transitioning Jamie Lee Curtis (the star of the 1978 franchise Halloween) from horror to comedy. The film also introduced the wonderful Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche to a younger generation.
As 2024 approaches, we should all take this time to reflect on how we as individuals can do our part to be more socially conscious and more kind to others. We need to remember to not take ourselves so seriously, to instead find opportunities to laugh. Movies like Trading Places — a rip-roaringly funny and still very relevant film — remind us that laughter is still the best medicine.
