Among all of the traditions suspended, curtailed, or canceled this past Christmas season, there was at least one custom that proved immune to the coronavirus: binge-watching Christmas movies. I saw them all this year, from Christmas movies that honor hearth and home (the beautiful British family drama The Holly and the Ivy) to those that attend to spiritual matters (Eric Rohmer’s A Tale of Winter) to those that simply mean to inspire guffaws (National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation).
Somewhat to my surprise, I found that I was most drawn to Christmas movies that celebrate this season of asking, buying, gifting, and receiving as a sort of capitalist bonanza. (Remember, Ayn Rand said: “The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialized.”) Countless Christmas movies affirm this perspective: One of the greatest, Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner, offers the inside of a department store, cozily well-stocked with trinkets and tchotchkes and buzzing with eager, lovable salespeople, as the perfect setting for a holiday romance, while the contemporary classic A Christmas Story revolves around the acquisition of tangible, tactile things, including that Red Ryder BB Gun.
Seldom in Christmas movie history has the sacred and the profane been as merrily married as in John Landis’s brilliant 1983 comedy Trading Places, which was reissued in a sparkling remastered transfer on Blu-ray in December. The film, set in a very cold, Christmassy Philadelphia during the first term of the Reagan administration, stars a stunningly supercilious Dan Aykroyd as Louis Winthorpe III, a to-the-manner born junior official at a commodities brokerage firm whose odious, racist superiors, brother billionaires Randolph and Mortimer Duke (Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche) have a philosophical difference of opinion on the question of nature versus nurture.
In the sharp, well-honed screenplay by Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod, the Dukes attempt to settle what they call “the eternal question” by placing a bet that uses people as pawns: Under the patently preposterous pretext that their star employee is an embezzler and runs a sideline as a drug dealer, the Dukes displace Winthorpe from his job and other sources of material comfort and, in his stead, anoint one Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy, brilliant), a basically decent small-time crook whose current con consists of impersonating a disabled Vietnam War veteran. “Given the right surroundings and encouragement, I’ll bet that that man could run our company as well as your young Winthorpe,” says one of the Dukes to the other.
Trading Places mixes high-toned screwball comedy with gritty social observation in a way rarely seen since classic 1930s-era comedies such as My Man Godfrey or Nothing Sacred. Landis, whose reputation for coarse, crude comedy belies his stable, measured visual style, opens the film with a tour of Philadelphia’s socioeconomic groups, from a homeless man sleeping on a sidewalk to a working-class butcher to the well-off Winthorpe to the beyond-belief-wealthy Dukes. The film induces laughter on multiple levels, but the first, and most obvious, is the sight of Winthorpe and Valentine being pushed, like players on a chessboard, into classes other than their own by the devious Dukes.
Landis is devilishly unrestrained in depicting Winthorpe’s gradual acclimation to his unjustly conferred status as a criminal: While being booked at the police station, Winthorpe, who speaks in a haughty, indignant tone that calls to mind Aykroyd’s impersonation of Julia Child, corrects the pronunciation of a police officer, who, when cataloging his possessions, mentions his tickets to the opera. “La Bo-heme. La Boheme — it’s an opera,” says Winthorpe, who, just a few scenes later, became sufficiently familiar with the lingo of the underworld to clarify which drug he is falsely accused of possessing to his outraged, doll-like fiancee, Penelope (Kristin Holby, then a model for Ralph Lauren): “It wasn’t heroin! It was angel dust — PCP!”
Winthorpe’s fall and Valentine’s ascent are visually encapsulated in the film’s greatest gag: Like ships passing in the night, Valentine, impeccably dressed and soon to demonstrate his unerring instinct for pork-belly futures, looks from the window of a Mercedes, once Winthorpe’s and now his, to catch a glimpse of Winthorpe, unshaven, black-eyed, and ranting, in a taxi opposite him.
At first glance, the categorization of Trading Places as a Christmas movie might seem incidental, seemingly resting on ornamental or atmospheric details, such as the huge Christmas tree that proudly adorns the lobby of the Dukes’ grand office building, the garlands that decorate a tony club inhabited by rich lads in tennis sweaters, or Winthorpe’s late appearance in the guise of a gun-and-roast-beef-wielding Santa Claus.
Yet Landis manages to connect the film to the larger pro-capitalism strain within the Christmas movie genre. For all of their cartoonishly exaggerated differences, Winthorpe, Valentine, and the game, financially savvy prostitute with whom Winthorpe takes up, Ophelia (Jamie Lee Curtis), share the same admirable goal: to make an awful lot of money, preferably while also bankrupting the odious Dukes. “It occurs to me that the best way to hurt rich people is by turning them into poor people,” says Valentine, who, in tandem with Winthorpe, exacts a decidedly pro-market form of revenge on the Dukes in a series of maneuvers on the floor of the New York Board of Trade.
Trading Places is surely an indictment of the moneyed class and its prejudices, but it’s hardly an indictment of money. In a rave review in the New York Times, Janet Maslin noted, bemusedly, that “this extravagant-looking film is itself too obviously enamored of wealth and prosperity to rail at the establishment with any real conviction.” But here, Maslin missed the point: Landis advocates not for the dismantling of the establishment but for restocking it with our four heroes — Winthorpe, Valentine, Ophelia, and Denholm Elliott’s butler, each of whom ends up with gobs of dough. For their part, the Dukes will not be seen again until they show up, in cameos as paupers, in a subsequent collaboration between Landis and Murphy, Coming to America, when they are the recipient of a handout from Murphy’s Prince Akeem. See? Trading Places has the Christmas spirit, after all.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
