Is Trading Places a Christmas Movie? The 1983 Comedy's Case

Is Trading Places a Christmas movie? The case for the holiday classic

Is Trading Places a Christmas movie? Yes, and the film makes the case itself. John Landis's 1983 comedy unfolds across the holiday season, its low point arrives on Christmas Eve, and its hero's fortunes turn the next day when he is taken in by a makeshift family. It is a holiday story with a profane vocabulary, a Santa suit used for sabotage and a villain's scheme hatched in the name of seasonal generosity.

That makes it the kind of holiday film that gets passed over in favor of the sentimental ones. The film stars Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy, was written by Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod, produced by Aaron Russo and released by Paramount Pictures on June 8, 1983, running 116 minutes. Its principal photography ran from December 1982 to March 1983, in Philadelphia and New York, with the closing beach scenes shot in St. Croix.

Part III of a column on holiday movies that some viewers would call inappropriate settles on Trading Places for good reason. It is rude, it is funny, and it is, in the end, about generosity.

The setup is simple. Louis Winthorpe III, played by Aykroyd, is the managing director of the commodities brokerage Duke & Duke. Billy Ray Valentine, played by Murphy, is a street hustler who can talk his way out of anything. The Duke brothers, Randolph and Mortimer, played by Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche, are very rich and very bored, and they make a wager on nature versus nurture: swap the two men's lives, and see whether a hustler can succeed in a rich man's job.

Landis, Aykroyd and Murphy

Landis had already directed Animal House, The Blues Brothers and An American Werewolf in London, and Trading Places is where his biting humor meets a pairing that looks inevitable in hindsight: two Saturday Night Live alumni, one already a TV star and the other a newcomer whose film debut, 48 Hrs, had come out the year before. Murphy plays Valentine with total confidence, and the film gives him room to improvise within a plot that never loses its shape.

Bellamy and Ameche, as Randolph and Mortimer Duke, are the quiet reason the story works. They play cruelty as polite boredom, and the audience believes that two men could place a bet on a human life and then forget about it over lunch. The performances were good enough that the pair returned in Coming to America in 1988.

Two men, two mornings

The film's opening cross-cuts are its spine. Winthorpe wakes to a butler, breakfast, the pork belly market and a chauffeur. Valentine is on a park bench, begging with a scheme that has him pretending to be disabled, and the movie lets the audience see exactly how much work his hustle takes. The class gap is a joke, and the joke is pointed.

When Valentine is accused of stealing Winthorpe's briefcase despite being innocent, the Dukes see their opening. They bail Valentine out, offer him a job and describe the whole thing as seasonal charity.

The fall of Louis Winthorpe

While Valentine adapts to the high life with delight, Winthorpe falls apart. He is framed for embezzlement, his fiancée drops him and Ophelia, a sex worker played by Jamie Lee Curtis, is paid to act as if they have a past. With his home taken and his bank accounts frozen, Winthorpe has nowhere to go but Ophelia's door, in a poor neighborhood, while he tries to figure out what has happened.

Valentine, meanwhile, is a natural. He uses street smarts to predict the market, his success reaches the newspapers and Winthorpe reads about the man who has taken over his old life. He decides to deliver a Christmas gift his successor will never forget, and turns up at the Duke & Duke office party in a Santa costume.

Revenge served cold

The party is where the film turns. Winthorpe goes there to sabotage Valentine's career, but Valentine overhears the bet that started everything. The two men join forces with Ophelia and the butler Coleman, played by Denholm Elliott, to set up the Dukes. The plan involves orange juice futures and a forged crop report, and it ends with the brothers ruined and the four friends on a beach.

Why Trading Places counts as a holiday film

• Christmas Eve is Winthorpe's lowest point, and the next day's turn begins with him joining a makeshift family.
• The Dukes frame their cruelty as seasonal goodwill, giving Valentine a job "in the spirit of the holiday season."
• The revenge plot is sprung at the Duke & Duke Christmas party, with Winthorpe in a Santa suit.
• The ending belongs to the same family as A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life: what a person is worth cannot be counted or sold.
• It is regularly listed among the best Christmas films ever made.

Trading Places: who plays whom

Trading Places review: why the film still lands

The film is startlingly relevant, and not only because of the season. The Dukes' bet is a large metaphor for the way a small group of very rich people can behave as invisible puppet masters of an economic system, making it expand and contract as they please. A related line from the real world is worth a mention: in 2010, Gary Gensler, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, cited the film's insider-trading plot in congressional testimony, and the related reform provision is informally called the Eddie Murphy rule.

The middle class is conspicuously absent from the movie, a point that has become more poignant over time. There are the very rich, and there are the people at the bottom, and the film is about what happens when they are made to see each other.

That brings out the moral. Trading Places is not about the haves and the have-nots, and it is not a lesson in appreciating what you own. It is about understanding that people are people, whatever their income. Someone who has no car and no perfect home may well have a larger heart than you do, and the film borrows the logic of classic Christmas stories: true wealth cannot be bought or sold.

The film has its problems. Critics have compared it to the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s but noted that it celebrates wealth in a way those films did not, and it has drawn criticism for its racial jokes and language. Even so, the performances hold it together. Elmer Bernstein's score, built on Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, earned an Academy Award nomination, and Denholm Elliott and Jamie Lee Curtis each won a BAFTA. The film made $120.6 million worldwide on a $15 million budget. So, is Trading Places a Christmas movie? For the purposes of this column, absolutely. It has the season in its structure, a redemption in its last act and a villain who gets exactly the present he deserves. Verdict: watch it in December, and enjoy it as the dirty Christmas movie that it is.

One practical note for viewers sensitive to language and jokes of the era: some of its language and a few of its jokes land very differently now. The best way to watch it is with an eye on what the film is attacking, which is the idea that circumstances do not shape people.

Sources

• Trading Places, Wikipedia — Checked against: director, cast and release year.