Trading Places

Brothers Randolph and Mortimer Duke own a commodities brokerage firm, Duke & Duke Commodity Brokers, in Philadelphia. Holding opposing views on the issue of nature versus nurture, they make a wager and agree to conduct an experiment—switching the lives of two people at opposite sides of the social hierarchy and observing the results. They witness an encounter between their managing director—the well-mannered and educated Louis Winthorpe III, engaged to the Dukes' grand-niece Penelope—and a poor street hustler named Billy Ray Valentine; Valentine is arrested at Winthorpe's insistence because of a suspected robbery attempt. The Dukes decide to use the two men for their experiment.

Winthorpe is framed as a thief, drug dealer and philanderer by Clarence Beeks, a man on the Dukes’ payroll. Winthorpe is fired from Duke & Duke, his bank accounts are frozen, he is denied entry to his Duke-owned home, and he is vilified by Penelope and his friends. He befriends Ophelia, a prostitute who helps him in exchange for a financial reward once he is exonerated. The Dukes bail Valentine out of jail, install him in Winthorpe's former job and grant him use of Winthorpe's home. Valentine becomes well-versed in the business using his street smarts to achieve success, and begins to act well-mannered.

During the firm's Christmas party, Winthorpe plants drugs in Valentine's desk attempting to frame him, and brandishes a gun to escape. Later, the Dukes discuss their experiment and settle their wager for $1, before plotting to return Valentine to the streets, but having no intention of taking back Winthorpe. Valentine overhears the conversation and seeks out Winthorpe, who has attempted suicide by overdosing on pills. Valentine, Ophelia, and Winthorpe's butler, Coleman, nurse him back to health and inform him of the experiment. From a television news broadcast, they learn that Clarence Beeks is transporting a secret USDA report on orange crop forecasts. Winthorpe and Valentine recall large payments made to Beeks by the Dukes, and realize that the Dukes will obtain the report early to corner the market on frozen concentrated orange juice.

On New Year's Eve, the four board Beeks' train, intending to switch the original report with a forgery that predicts low orange crop yields. Beeks uncovers their scheme, and attempts to kill them, but is knocked unconscious by a gorilla being transported on the train. The four disguise Beeks with a gorilla costume, and cage him with the real gorilla. After delivering the forged report to the Dukes in Beeks' place, Valentine and Winthorpe travel to New York City with Coleman's and Ophelia's life savings to carry out the plan.

On the commodities trading floor, the Dukes commit their holdings to buying frozen concentrated orange juice futures contracts; other traders follow their lead, inflating the price. Valentine and Winthorpe short sell frozen concentrated orange juice futures contracts at the inflated price. Following the broadcast of the actual crop report and its prediction of a normal harvest, the price of orange juice futures plummets. Valentine and Winthorpe start buying futures at the lower price from everyone except the Dukes, to fulfill the contracts they short sold earlier, turning an immense profit. After the closing bell, Valentine and Winthorpe explain to the Dukes that they made a wager on whether they could get rich and make the Dukes poor at the same time, and Valentine collects $1 from Winthorpe. The exchange manager and his assistants approach the Dukes to settle their margin call. When the Dukes make it clear they do not have the $394 million due, the manager orders the Dukes' exchange seats sold, and their corporate and personal assets confiscated, effectively bankrupting them. Randolph collapses holding his chest, and Mortimer shouts angrily at the others, demanding the floor be reopened in a futile plea to recoup their losses. The now wealthy Valentine, Winthorpe, Ophelia, and Coleman vacation on a tropical beach, while Beeks and the gorilla are loaded onto a ship bound for Africa.

• Dan Aykroyd as Louis Winthorpe III
• Eddie Murphy as Billy Ray Valentine
• Ralph Bellamy as Randolph Duke
• Don Ameche as Mortimer Duke
• Denholm Elliott as Coleman
• Jamie Lee Curtis as Ophelia
• Kristin Holby as Penelope Witherspoon, Louis Winthorpe's fiancée.
• Paul Gleason as Clarence Beeks

The cast also includes Robert Curtis-Brown as Todd, Winthorpe's romantic rival for Penelope; James Belushi as Harvey, a party-goer on New Year's Eve; Jamie Lee Curtis' sister Kelly Curtis cameos as Penelope's friend Muffy; Frank Oz as a police officer; James Eckhouse as a police officer; Giancarlo Esposito as a cellmate; Muppet performer Richard Hunt as Wilson, a broker on the futures exchange trading floor; and Bo Diddley as a pawnbroker.[3] Tom Davis and Al Franken, also Saturday Night Live cast members, cameo as train baggage handlers.

Ameche's and Bellamy's characters Mortimer and Randolph Duke make a cameo appearance as two homeless men in the 1988 film Coming to America, also directed by Landis and starring Eddie Murphy.[4] A segment of the Trading Places score can be heard during their scene.

The film was originally called Black and White. It was the idea of Timothy Harris who was inspired by two brothers he would play tennis against; they were very wealthy and cheap and engaged in rivalry. Harris came up with the story and told it to his writing partner Herschel Weingrod. They sold the script to Paramount where Jeffrey Katzenberg offered it to John Landis.[5]

Landis called it a "very old fashioned, a social comedy very much like the screwball stuff done in the '30s. "[5] The script had been developed for Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder but then Pryor was involved in a severe accident. Paramount suggested Eddie Murphy as a replacement (48 Hours had been filmed but not released). Landis liked him and pushed for Dan Aykroyd as a co star. Paramount were reluctant as they felt Aykroyd would not work without John Belushi; Landis says "conventional wisdom was that Aykroyd without Belushi was like Abbott without Costello, and that his career was over." Landis felt that Aykroyd "was a fine actor, and he could easily play this guy. Danny, he's an actor: You tell him what you want, and he delivers. And I thought he'd be wonderful."[5]

Landis cast Jamie Lee Curtis over the objections of studio executives who thought she was just a horror star. She was paid $70,000 and says Landis "single-handedly changed the course of my life by giving me that part."[5]

For the part of the villains, Landis wanted to cast a 1940s film star who had never played a villain. His first choice was Ray Milland, but Milland could not pass the insurance physical.[6] After consulting with the Paramount casting department, he thought of Don Ameche.[5] Ameche had no agent listed with the Screen Actors Guild, but he was in the phone book, so Landis simply called him and asked if he'd play the part.[7]

The storyline of Trading Places—a member of society trading places with another whose socio-economic status stands in direct contrast to his own—often draws comparisons to Mark Twain's novel The Prince and the Pauper.[8][9][10][11][12] First published in 1881, the novel follows the lives of a prince and a beggar—both of them of adolescent age—who use their uncanny resemblance to each other as a premise to switch places temporarily; the prince takes on a life of poverty and misery while the pauper enjoys the lavish luxuries of a royal life. Parallels have also been drawn between Trading Places and Mozart's 18th century comic opera The Marriage of Figaro in which a servant (Figaro) foils the plans of his rich master who tried to steal Figaro's bride to be.[13][14] The music from The Marriage of Figaro is used as a cinematic narrative in the film when the viewers are introduced to the daily routine of protagonist Louis Winthorpe's privileged life with the opera's overture playing in the background.[15][16] The work also takes inspiration from Twain's The Million Pound Bank Note.[17]

American philosopher and professor at Harvard University Stanley Cavell wrote about Trading Places in his 2005 book Cavell on Film. Cavell postulates that film is sometimes used as a new technology in the production and experience of an opera. He explains that this axiom asserts its importance not in the fact that "our time" sees an increased expectation of new operas being developed but, rather, in the fact that there is an increased expectation of "new productions of operas." Cavell draws a comparison of themes between Trading Places and the opera The Marriage of Figaro, stating that "what Trading Places wants from its reference to Figaro is mostly the idea of resourceful and sociable young and poor overcoming with various disguises the conniving of the unsociable old and rich but with no sense that the old may be redeemed by a recognition of their faults and no revolutionary desire to see the world formed on a new basis."[13]

David Budd, in his 2002 book Culture Meets Culture in the Movies, writes about the experiences of characters when the expected roles of races in society are sometimes reversed. The 1995 fiction film White Man's Burden and John Howard Griffin's factual book Black Like Me are used as a foundation to show how different the experience of white people can be when subjected to the prejudices faced by black people. In that respect, Budd proclaims Trading Places as "uncannily illustrative if heavy-handed". Beginning from the premise that, in the film, the "expectations of the races also stand upon their head", Budd states that "through even a highly comedic vessel a message loudly asking for a reassessment of prejudice, and for level playing fields, is heard."[9]

A score album was released by La-La Land Records on October 11, 2011 and was limited to 2000 copies.[33] The album features Elmer Bernstein's Oscar-nominated score, as well as the source material that he wrote and arranged, including traditional Christmas carols that appear in the film. A significant portion of Bernstein's music is based on Mozart's music from The Marriage of Figaro.[33] "Do Ya Wanna Funk," a hit song by Sylvester featured in the movie, was omitted from the album. The song "The Loco-Motion" by Little Eva is also heard in the train scene and is credited on the film.

Almost 30 years after its release, the plot for the movie was part of the inspiration for new regulations on the financial markets. On March 3, 2010, Commodity Futures Trading Commission chief Gary Gensler stated, in testimony he gave to the 111th Congress: "We have recommended banning using misappropriated government information to trade in the commodity markets. In the movie Trading Places, starring Eddie Murphy, the Duke brothers intended to profit from trades in frozen concentrated orange juice futures contracts using an illicitly-obtained and not-yet-public Department of Agriculture orange crop report."[34]

The "Eddie Murphy Rule", as it came to be known, later came into effect as Section 136 of the Wall Street Transparency and Accountability Act of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, under Section 746, which dealt with insider trading.[35]

In Italy, the movie has become a Christmas Eve classic, being broadcast by Italian television every year, from December 24, 1986.[36]

• List of American films of 1983

• Budd, David (2002). "Classic Encounters of Black on White". Culture Meets Culture in the Movies: an Analysis East, West, North, and South, With Filmographies. McFarland & Company. pp. 210. ISBN 0-7864-1095-7.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Min, Eungjun (1999). "Images of the Homeless in the Motion Pictures". Reading the Homeless: The Media's Image of Homeless Culture. Praeger Publishers. p. 167. ISBN 0-275-95950-3.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Childs, Peter (2006). "Pop Video". Texts: Contemporary Cultural Texts and Critical Approaches. Edinburgh University Press. p. 44. ISBN 0-7486-2043-5.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Truby, John (2007). "Moral Argument". The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller. Faber and Faber. p. 133. ISBN 978-0-86547-951-7.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Cavell, Stanley (2005). "Opera in (and as) Film)". Cavell on Film. State University of New York Press. pp. 309–311. ISBN 0-7914-6431-8.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Chatman, Seymour (1990). "Narrative and Two Other Text-Types". Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Cornell University Press. p. 8. ISBN 0-8014-9736-1.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

• Smith, Robert (July 12, 2013). "What Actually Happens At The End Of 'Trading Places'?". All Things Considered. Planet Money (NPR). Retrieved November 13, 2013.
• "Guy Who Wrote 'Trading Places' Responds To Our Show About His Movie". Planet Money (NPR). July 24, 2013. Retrieved November 13, 2013.

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