4/3/2023 0 Comments Trading places castIt is hard today to recommend it in good conscience. The film is still very funny, but not funny enough. Any who watched it again over the holidays may have been jarred, even shamed, by attitudes and language that they once blithely tolerated. “Trading Places” is lovingly remembered by lots of viewers now in middle age (perhaps the white, male sort in particular). The lesson is summed up in an exchange between the Dukes. They can and do-a reversal meant to show the predominance of nurture over nature, which winds up implying that poverty makes people morally deficient. The plot itself revolves around a bet between the Dukes, who run a commodities brokerage, over whether they can successfully install Mr Murphy’s black street hustler in place of Mr Aykroyd’s pompous white executive, at the same time impoverishing the suit such that he resorts to crime. That is the nadir, but there are lots of cringe-inducing moments: racial stereotyping, explicit and vicious racism that is presented as reprehensible but played for laughs, casual homophobia, a caricature Irishman and gratuitous nudity. As the heroes don disguises to gull the Dukes’ henchman, Mr Aykroyd’s character needlessly blacks up he then engages in some nauseating badinage with Mr Murphy, himself doing a grisly impersonation of an exchange student from Cameroon. The train ride is also when the issues of taste, and race, which scar the film are most glaring. This is when the heroes-played by Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd, Jamie Lee Curtis and Denholm Elliott-pull off a heist that will launch their new lives while ruining the baddies, the Duke brothers (Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy), a pair of nasty elderly plutocrats. The sequence on the train is pivotal in more than one way. It is a salutary new year’s object lesson in the reassessment of troubling art. The film is a Janus-faced contradiction, reaching backwards to old prejudices yet in other ways modern. “Trading Places”, John Landis’s rags-to-riches (and vice versa) comedy of 1983, is often considered a Christmas movie, but it is really a story about, and for, the turn of the year. I t is New Year’s Eve, and bawdy revellers are enjoying a fancy-dress party on an American train in the baggage compartment is a caged gorilla in the care of two doofus handlers.
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