Why the PC film snobs are wrong about Trading Places

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the UK release of Trading Places – arguably the funniest film of all time, and without doubt the ultimate, feel-good Christmas movie, yet one which, to my chagrin is regularly overlooked by snooty highbrow critics and supercilious celluloid aficionados who traditionally omit it from their annual lists of best festive films.

As one comment below a clip from the film on YouTube piquantly asserts, Trading Places is “a f______ 20th century masterpiece”. Yet I often feel that in my championing of Trading Places I am shouting into the wind, like Lear on the heath in the raging storm.

Starring comic titans Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, together with a stellar supporting cast of Jamie Lee Curtis, Denholm Elliot, Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy, this commercial success (it made $120 million at the US box office) is a perfectly scripted, perfectly acted and perfectly paced comic-philosophical triumph. Moreover, it is a sophisticated Rabelaisian satire on race, class, wealth and the whole notion of the American dream which still speaks eloquently to today’s racial and social concerns.

When wise-cracking, braggadocious street hustler Billy Ray Valentine (Murphy, giving an astonishingly assured performance in what was remarkably only his second film role, aged 22), unknowingly swaps places with pampered, Harvard-educated, commodities broker Louis Winthorpe III (Aykroyd, in a career-defining role) and takes over his opulent lifestyle and job as part of a one-dollar bet – a nurture versus nature social experiment conducted by the fabulously wealthy yet venal, morally repugnant and viscerally racist Duke brothers (Bellamy and Ameche), the results are hilarious, poignant and thought-provoking.

Directed with consummate panache by John Landis, with a masterful screenplay by Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod, and set in Philadelphia over the Christmas and New Year period, the film inhabits a very specific geographical, racial and social milieu, but its premise, plot and humour are enduringly relevant to all.

Whether it’s immortal lines such as the one proffered by Valentine when boasting of his martial arts prowess, having just demonstrated his infamous “quart of blood” technique, (“Karate men bruise on the inside!”), the sight of an atrociously blacked-up Winthorpe on the train to New York on NYE posing as dreadlocked Rastafarian Lionel Joseph, with his lilting, faux-Jamaican patois (“Irie, irie, irie! I certainly hope there’s enough space on the train for me.”) or Valentine, dressed in full African regalia as Cameroonian exchange student Nenge Mboko, wishing fellow passengers on the train “Merry New Year!” in his stentorian, baritone voice – classic jocular gems abound.

Yet beneath the raucous, often salacious humour, there lies much profound wisdom and sagacious life counsel. In lines culled straight from Polonius’ advice to Laertes in Hamlet, the butler Coleman (Elliot, in a role for which he won a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor) advises Valentine on the eve of his first day working for the duplicitous Dukes: “Just be yourself, sir. Whatever happens, they can’t take that away from you.”

At its heart, Trading Places is a savage critique of avarice, insider trading and rapacity, personified by the brothers Randolph and Mortimer Duke (played with a mixture of affability and odiousness by Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche) who thankfully get their comeuppance in the film’s famous concluding scenes on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Trading Places is also a skilful evisceration of the hermetically sealed, inveterately racist, WASP patrician class - of Winthorpe, his fiancée Penelope, their fickle, floppy-fringed friends and of the cosseted world of East Coast old money from which they hail, complete with palatial townhouses, sycophantic valets and exclusive tennis clubs, where obscene wealth, tremendous privilege and pernicious prejudice go hand in hand, and where noblesse sadly obliges no-one but themselves.

With its leitmotif of lampooning antediluvian bigotry, the film hilariously plays on the white fear of the black usurpation of their power and affluence and mercilessly satirises other hackneyed racist stereotypes, such as when Randolph Duke, on hearing Valentine singing in the jacuzzi, earnestly says to his brother, “They’re a very musical people, aren’t they?”.

The film is positively Boccaccian – a delightfully observed human comedy and a modern, Philly-set Decameron with a Boethian wheel of fortune thrown in for good measure, albeit one couched in the mellifluous cadences of ebonics. Imbued with powerful insights into our foibles and failings, celebrating intelligence and quick-wittedness, it emphasises our desire to not let our earthly flourishing be stymied by the hand fortune has dealt us at birth.

Trading Places also stridently asserts that it is nurture, not nature, which is the defining factor in how our lives ultimately play out. Valentine, despite being born in the ghetto, takes to the world of commodities brokering like a duck to water, making full use of his copious street smarts and realpolitik philosophy to run the Dukes’ brokerage business far more successfully than Winthorpe, even though, in that unforgettable line delivered with pure disdain by Mortimer Duke, when speaking to his brother about Valentine, “Of course there’s something wrong with him. He’s a negro! He’s probably been stealing since he could crawl.”

Moreover, the film’s unambiguous moral posits that true happiness lies not in the myopic, pathological acquisition of money, but in the establishment of meaningful, sincere human relationships, regardless of colour, class or level of educational attainment. Sadly, 40 years later, we still inhabit an increasingly Manichaean world of extreme wealth and heinous poverty, where true social mobility and racial justice, not to mention equality of opportunity for all, remain utopian fantasies. That fact alone makes Trading Places perennially relevant.

However, whilst I concede that it is very much of its time, containing scenes which might well be jarring to modern, “woke” sensibilities, the film – like all truly great art – is also both timeless and universal, managing to effortlessly transcend race and class while simultaneously being anchored in it.

And yet some people remain curiously resistant to the film’s myriad charms. Perhaps it is merely a case of elitist, chin-stroking snobbery which deems it too low brow and demotic? Perhaps it is the film’s flagrant use of egregious racial epithets, including the caustic use of the N word?

Perhaps it is the politically incorrect jokes about disability, the racial insensitivity of the infamous blacking up scene, the casual homophobia (e.g. references to “faggots”), the blithely insouciant attitude to prostitution or even the tacit bestiality (with a gorilla)? Maybe it is a combination of all these factors which makes Trading Places a little too outré for some palettes. But viewers should see beyond these potentially problematic, minor artistic “indiscretions” and instead focus on the totality of the film’s brilliance.

With its penetrating insights into human psychology, coruscating one-liners and immensely satisfying dénouement, Trading Places (to paraphrase Ben Jonson’s famous adage about Shakespeare) is ‘not of an age, but for all time.’ So in a spirit of festive munificence, I urge you to re-watch it, as I do every year in my own Yuletide ritual. Enjoy this unfairly neglected chef d’oeuvre, laugh deeply and toast this magisterial film’s genius, perhaps with its immortal, concluding lines, “Looking good, Billy Ray!” “Feeling good, Louis!”

Trading Places is available on Paramount Plus

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