TRADING PLACES: 4K UHD Blu-ray (Paramount, 1983) Paramount Home Video

Director, John Landis’ Trading Places (1983) hails from an epoch in American comedy unabashed, ready and eager to take its pot shots at the infirmed and indigent. Aside: we take things much too seriously today - perhaps. Movies like Trading Places are exercises in obscene political in-correctness, the funny bone judiciously tickled by our then laissez faire approach to life in general. Is this a bad thing? Let us merely suggest, not all humor needs to be highbrow to work, though some of what is here has not aged well and is cringe-worthy – regardless of one’s level of tolerance for commercial crassness. What was whack-tac-ularly crude, even for the eighties, has either mellowed or has since become mortifyingly wicked and salacious with the passage of time, Murphy’s lampoon of a pseudo-lame Stevie Wonder-type, navigating the cruel streets of Philly on his push cart, likely plays as more bigoted than big-hearted’ and more shamefully as mockery than mirth.

Aside: whenever I review a picture made by Mr. Landis, I find myself sincerely lacking in objectivity. The reason stems from Mr. Landis’ cavalry response to the hellish decapitations of two co-stars and the crushing to death of another on the set of The Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) while shooting an idiotically daring action sequence involving a helicopter flying too low and a series of pyrotechnics, personally detonated by Landis, to affect a more ‘dramatic’ moment in the picture. What he achieved instead was the triple homicides of actor, Vic Morrow and children, Myca Dinh Le (only age 7) and Renee Shin-Yi Chen (age 6). Not only did Mr. Landis disregard California child labor laws, that forbade the use of underaged performers at night – and – in close proximity to explosions (a decision he continues to deny culpability while glibly suggesting it was ‘wrong’…Aside: you think?!?) but, at trial, Landis’ behavior can only be described as ‘bizarre’, seemingly, to become occasionally ‘amused’ and, in a statement to the press shortly after his exoneration, minimizing his complicity by deflecting it elsewhere, adding “…if something isn’t safe, it’s the right and responsibility of every actor and crew member to yell ‘Cut!’” Not that anyone working on the set could have affected as much decision-making as Mr. Landis. But, I digress.

Trading Places was a springboard for SNL comedian, Eddie Murphy as well as a decided ‘leg up for costars, Dan Aykroyd and Jamie Lee Curtis, buffeted by the performances of two Hollywood alumni, Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche, the latter, reluctant to play a scene where his character utters an explicative in a frenzied rush of greedy disdain for his, as perverse, but ailing brother. As is usual, Landis had his way, with Ameche – one of filmdom’s true gentlemen – screeching “Fuck him!” for all to hear: decidedly, not his finest moment.  Written by Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod, Trading Places tells the warped tale of Louis Winthrope III (Aykroyd) – a white-privileged commodities broker whose comfortable life and future happiness are utterly dismantled on the whim of a ‘dollar bet’ between his bosses/brothers, Mortimer (Ameche) and Randolph Duke (Bellamy), merely to test their theory about money and its influence on a man’s character. To this end, the Dukes elect to pluck an obscure street hustler, Billie Ray Valentine (Murphy) from his impoverished obscurity and set him up in Louis’ former posh digs. Mortimer suggests Valentine will squander his opportunities, merely to indulge his proclivities for strong drink and cheap sex. However, Randolph believes Valentine will seek to live up to the circumstances of his instant wealth. At first, Valentine seems to bear out the former scenario, arriving at a local pub and inviting all of its riffraff back to ‘his’ mansion for a wild party. But when the night begins to spin out of control, Valentine becomes disgusted by the behavior of his contemporaries and sends them instantly packing, much to the relief of the house’s silent and long-suffering butler, Coleman (Delholm Elliott).

Meanwhile, unaware of the double-cross, Winthrope’s life has completely derailed. He is arrested, dismissed from his job, evicted from his home, and, spurned by his country club friends and fair-weather fiancée, Penelope Witherspoon (Kristin Holby as the Suzy Cream-Cheese). Along the way, Winthrope picks up the prostitute, Ophelia (Jamie Lee Curtis) whom he implores to help him regain at least some equilibrium in his life, in exchange for the promise of a wealthy little dividend at the end of his recovery.  Meanwhile, Valentine becomes invested in his new desire to succeed, using his street smarts to the Dukes’ benefit. Alas, Winthrope crashes the firm’s Christmas party disguised as a gun-toting Santa, planting drugs in Valentine’s desk. Observing the fiasco, the Dukes quietly settle their bet for a measly dollar, plotting to ruin Valentine, but with no desire to take Winthrope back.  Overhearing their perverted plot, Valentine now joins forces with Winthrope and Ophelia to avenge the wrong perpetrated on them. Together with Coleman, this motley crew discovers the man who framed them, Clarence Beeks (Paul Gleason) is working for the Dukes, presently hired to steal a ‘top secret’ USDA report on orange crop forecasting that will make the Dukes even richer by crookedly cornering the market on frozen concentrated orange juice.

Intercepting Beeks on a westbound train and switching the original report with a forgery predicting low crop yields, Valentine, Winthrope and Ophelia are hunted down by Beeks, whom they knock unconscious, dress as a gorilla and lock inside a cage with the real McCoy bound for a zoo. Now, Winthrope and Valentine head for the New York stock exchange with their life savings.  On the commodities trading floor, the Dukes legally commit their entire holdings on this falsified pretext. On their reputation alone, other traders follow their lead, driving up the price. Valentine and Winthorpe short-sell juice futures at the inflated price. Moments later, the actual crop report hits the floor and juice futures plummet.  Valentine and Winthrope confront the Dukes, suggesting they had a ‘dollar bet’ to see if they could get rich and make the Dukes poor at the same time.  As the Dukes cannot recover their $394 million margin call, their seats are sold and all corporate and personal assets get confiscated, leaving them penniless. Our story concludes with Valentine, Winthorpe, Ophelia, and Coleman vacationing in the tropics, even as Beeks and the gorilla are loaded onto a ship bound for Africa.

Trading Places was loosely based on a real-life sibling rivalry between two wealthy brothers. Screenwriters, Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod initially conceived it as a star vehicle for Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder to capitalize on their runaway success in 1980’s Stir Crazy. Alas, fate is a curious thing. Pryor’s ill-timed playing with fire while freebasing cocaine greatly diminished his likability as a bankable star.  And Wilder, without Pryor, could not see his way to continue. Unable to secure the services of either star, Landis instead offered the picture to Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy – the latter, then, a rising talent on the small screen. While Paramount agreed to these casting changes, even as they did not much believe in Aykroyd’s talents as a solo artist, Landis ran into even graver studio opposition over the casting of Jamie Lee Curtis. Evidently, Paramount execs could not see beyond her tenure as a ‘scream queen’ in B-budgeted horror movies. Nevertheless, Curtis is a genuine hoot as the calculating prostitute, her camp lampoon as a Swedish exchange student - in lederhosen, no less - is the absolute highlight in this totally absurd petty larceny.

Landis shot virtually all of Trading Places on location in sub-zero temperatures in Philadelphia and Manhattan under the working title ‘Black and White’ – which Landis deeply despised, the penultimate moments depicting Valentine, Winthrope and Ophelia’s escape to the tropics, lensed off the island of St. Croix. Trading Places went on to be the 4th highest-grossing movie of the year, re-igniting interest in Jamie Lee Curtis’ career and kick-starting Eddie Murphy’s tenure in the big leagues as one of the most ‘sought after’ performers of his generation. In the years since its release, Trading Places has remained something of a high-water mark in Landis’ career – a very loose throwback to the classic Hollywood screwball, anted up with explicative and crude humor, equally lobbed in racially-loaded epitaphs and sexual farce to appeal to the gritty/gaudy guffawing of the 1980’s. For the Duke brothers, Landis pursued his two Hollywood stalwarts with gusto, although originally, he had hoped to cast star, Ray Milland, whose ill health precluded getting insurance on him.

The casting of Don Ameche requires a bit of explanation. In the first place, Landis’ casting director claimed Ameche was already deceased without actually checking to see if this was true.  Mercifully, the retired Hollywood legend was still very much alive and living comfortably out of the spotlight. Landis hunted down Ameche the old-fashioned way, looking him up in the telephone directory Sensing a ‘has been’ quality about him, Paramount refused to offer Ameche what his contemporary, Ralph Bellamy was being paid. As a matter of pride, Ameche held out until the studio balked. Hence, Ameche’s salary demands caused the studio to shave off the top of the picture’s overall $15 million budget to cover expenses. Shooting inside the COMEX commodity exchange at No. 4 World Trade Center proved a genuine challenge for Landis as virtually all the extras were real-life traders – the presence of a camera crew and stars Murphy and Aykroyd on the floor, causing all routine trades to come to a screeching halt for two days: a veritable eternity in the world of high finance.

Viewed today, Trading Places seems an almost demure comedy of errors – peppered in loaded distractions to call out the specters of race and gender inequality. The funny moments are still…well…funny, if not ‘fall down/drag out’ hilarious, while the more serious underpinnings – heightened by the eighties’ obsession with materialism – now plays as though to have been conceived not just from another time, but indeed, another planet.  Paramount has finally come around to offering Trading Places in native 4K. Their Paramount Presents…collector’s edition only gave us a Blu-ray derived from a 4K master off an original camera negative. Comparatively speaking, the native 4K improves marginally in color reproduction with a slight uptick in more noticeable fine detail. Film grain now appears quite natural.  There’s still a problem with minute black crush. And a handful of scenes appear to suffer from minor gate weave, quite obvious in the main and end titles.

We get the same DTS 5.1, derived from the theatrical mono and virtually indistinguishable from the aforementioned Blu-ray. There are NO extras on the 4K. But Paramount has also included the Blu-ray. So, you still get the Filmmaker’s Focus with Landis – another of those short-shrift pass-overs in which only the most superficial details are briefly glossed in between inserts of sound bites and snippets from the movie itself. Everything that was on the previous Blu-ray and DVD releases of this movie has been ported over here as well. So, a real ‘making of’ divided into several featurettes, covers virtually every aspect of the movie. We also get deleted scenes, an isolated score and a theatrical trailer. Good stuff here, on a so-so comedy with more crud than class. There are plenty reasons to laugh. Kick-in-the-crotch humor being one of them. But Trading Places hasn’t held up quite so well as some other comedies from its vintage. Judge and buy accordingly.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

3

VIDEO/AUDIO

4.5

EXTRAS

5+