Mortimer Duke doesn't agree that Valentine could run their company and that Winthorpe would become a criminal, so he takes the bet-the usual amount.Through their influence, the Dukes change the places of Valentine and Winthorpe to see how their lives would turn out. Simultaneously, Randolph proposes that if Winthorpe were to lose his home, lose his friends, lose his reputation, and lose his freedom, he might resort to criminal behavior. But Randolph bets that Valentine, given the right environment, could run their company as well as Winthorpe. Mortimer Duke, the more bigoted of the two, brushes it off. The upper class is safe-for the moment.However, as Valentine is being hauled off to the slammer, Randolph Duke speculates that the African-American Valentine may actually have more smarts than he is given credit. The two literally collide, like the aristocracy and the peasantry in the French revolution, although Valentine is immediately apprehended. You know the kind where the hired help is dressed as if they are going to the opera opening night.On the other side of the railroad tracks is Billy Ray Valentine, Capricorn (Eddie Murphy in one of his all-time best performances), who is a con-artist posing as a crippled Vietnam Veteran. When Winthorpe isn't making money through commodities trading, he's smoking pipes with his former Harvard classmates at a gentleman's club reminiscent of the Bohemian Club. He works in the finance department of a commodities brokerage firm run by two Scrooges that would give King Midas a run for his money, Mortimer Duke and Randolph Duke, played with subtle irreverence by two veterans of Hollywood's by-gone era, Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy. Beaumarchais was a French 18th-century novelist who brought the clashes of the classes to the forefront through his fictions, and this is the essence of "Trading Places".Dan Ackroyd is the young, ambitious, if somewhat naive, Louis Winthorpe III who is a member of the Philadelphia upper crust. Scenes of a-day-in-the-life of the moneyed elite inter-spliced with the mundane labor of the working class to the overture of the Marriage of Figaro by Mozart/Da Ponte based on the novel by Beaumarchais. In short, the filmmakers respected their audience enough to inadvertently tell us something about the American social strata, and do it without a documentary.Even the opening credits hint at the coming confrontation. And yet somehow, "Trading Places" manages to incorporate all these aspects onto the same film reel while splashing unexpected comedy that keeps the entertainment level constantly high. And almost none give a lesson in high stakes commodities futures trading. Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2015įew comedies today actually comment on social issues, and even fewer do it without it getting preachy. Entertaining Comedy with Commentary on the Haves, the Have Nots, and Futures Trading
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |