everything you don’t know about the film by John Landis – Corriere.it

We know, it’s still hard to believe. But “An armchair for two/Trading Places” by John Landis, the film that more than any other in Italy has become a “Christmas” classic (thanks to the programming of Italia 1 which since 1997 has made it a regular presence in every subsequent Christmas Eve, except for 2005), debuted in US theaters in the very late spring of 1983, on June 8th. And even its (late) distribution here took place in mid-January 1984, after the holidays had long since ended. Playing in favor of this TV peculiarity is undoubtedly the setting of the story, narratively compressed between Christmas and New Year’s, but in a Philadelphia cynically almost devoid of any frills linked to Advent.

Here two lives inextricably intersect: the wealthy one of the stockbroker Louis Winthorpe III (Dan Aykroyd), engaged to the beautiful and vacuous Penelope (Kristin Holby) and “cared for” by the very human butler Coleman (Denholm Elliott), and the one made up of hardships and petty scams of the homeless Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy) who puts together lunch and dinner by begging and posing as a veteran of the war in Vietnam. When on Christmas Eve the two casually come into contact due to an alleged assault by Billy Ray on Louis, even the second’s very stingy employers, the brothers Mortimer (Don Ameche) and Randolph Duke (Ralph Bellamy), casually witness the scene: and they start a “philosophical” discussion which leads them to make a bizarre choice.

Since the former argues that the predisposition to success or crime is genetic while the second asserts that it is the social milieu that determines a positive or negative disposition, the two decide in fact – against the bet of a single symbolic dollar and with the complicity of the corrupt government official Clarence Beeks ( Paul Gleason) and the reluctant Coleman- to have the lives of Louis and Valentine temporarily switch. Billy Ray, projected into high society, thus discovers that he is half a financial genius, while a discredited Louis falls into abjection and a desire for revenge against the usurper. During his descent into hell, after being abandoned by friends and girlfriend, Winthorpe finds the unexpected help of the prostitute Ophelia (Jamie Lee Curtis), originally hired to frame him.

But after his reprehensible deeds will have made Randolph win the bet, Louis will team up in extremis with Billy Ray to turn the joke against their greedy “puppeteers”. Opened by the overture of Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro”, “An armchair for two” represents for John Landis an unexpected “take” on the forms of classic Hollywood cinema that his precedents (the films superficially branded as “demented” “Animal House” , 1978, and “The Blues Brothers”, 1980; and especially the comedy/horror masterpiece “An American Werewolf in London”, 1981) did not let us foresee. But if the screenplay by Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod steals the inspiration of the subject without declaring it to “The Stranger / The Million Pound Note” (1952) by Ronald Neame (based on the short novel by Mark Twain “The Million Pound Note ”) clearly looks into the Hollywood-like structure of social “high comedies” à la Preston Sturges, Frank Capra and Charles Walters, all the “low” and -inevitably- “subversive” glimpses are very personally by Landis, a filmmaker whose derisory and political inspiration remains still a matter of conversation for a few.

In fact, with “An armchair for two” he goes on stage between the lines an irreverent indictment of the most intimate and petty manifestation of capitalism and its transient and tragicomic nature: in an apparently normative but profoundly anarchic form, as in all of Landis’ most successful films, which plays with the construction of stereotypes (and of the imaginary) to progressively debone them in a riot of politically incorrect that is almost unthinkable today. Always resorting to a frozen “slapstick” mechanic that almost seems to want to question the very functioning of comedy and, when necessary, to self-quotation (the whole famous, hilarious parenthesis with the fake gorilla descends to some extent automatically from his unacknowledged 1973 debut , “Slok/Schlock”) and (almost always when the scene is dominated by the extraordinary and busty -seeing is, ahem, believing- Jamie Lee Curtis) to a lowering of degree (even of the image itself) in the territories of the “sleazy” when not even the most typical exploitation of the previous decade.

In terms of form, Landis, wonderfully served by the “impossible” alchemy between the old associate Aykroyd and the then emerging – and already “beyond” – Murphy (although everything had originally been thought of for the couple Gene Wilder/Richard Pryor before the health conditions of the latter would jeopardize the project), it perennially and deliberately oscillates in an almost timeless and stylistically wavering limbo which enhances its fabula dimension (with more than one reference also to the works of Carl Barks: the Dukes are Scrooges/Scrooges outlined with typically cartoonish touches) linking the American cinema of the golden age (with two gigantic guarantors such as the elderly, wild, highly amused Ameche and Bellamy: whom Landis will affectionately return five years later in the same role – but as beggars – with a cameo in “The prince seeks a wife/Coming to America”) and the coeval and post-New Hollywood one that will brand the decade of the Eighties.

On the content side, however, he increases the dose of cynicism already exhibited previously in his cinema and puts it at the service of a very clear ideological stance already starting from the original title (which at first was, no less explicitly, “Black and White”). If “trading places” in fact means “places of exchange”, in the superficially “economic” meaning of the term, even every cog, every continuation of the narrative reflects politically and with bitterness the vision of a world in which every action is the daughter of a strategy exchange or contract. Caustically drawing an America already steeped in Reaganism (and it is no coincidence that the setting is Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the city where both the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the Constitution, in 1788, were conceived) where every alternative option to negotiation or compromise was banned or simply not contemplated. A vision so paradoxically not only “anti-Christmas” but also “anti-system” that the favor with which it has been welcomed for almost thirty years as an event to celebrate the holidays in (alleged) joy still remains almost a mystery. But so be it.