Todd’s Movie Blog

Trading Places is one of the funniest comedies to come out of the eighties, which is no surprise as it starred two alumunus of Saturday Night Live, Dan Akroyd and Eddie Murphy, and was directed by comedy/ horror expert John Landis (sadly this would be Landis’ last big hit).  The plot is a reworking of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper with big business being substituted for royalty.

Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche play two rich fat cat brothers who have an argument about nature versus nurture.  To see who is right they decide to frame their investment guru nephew, Dan Akroyd, for a crime and drop him into the gutter while elevating a street con man, Eddie Murphy, to Akroyd’s position over the Christmas Holiday and see what happens.  Murphy proves adaptable to the rich man’s life and even able to make some accurate predictions on the stock market, while Akroyd sinks into poverty and despair that is only lightened by his connecting with a kind hearted hooker played by jamie Lee Curtis.

Murphy learns he’s been played by the two old men at the company Christmas party and tracks down Akroyd so that they can turn the tables on them with some clever stock exchange manuvers that will make them rich while leaving Akroyd’s uncles penniless.  A very funny film, with Murphy and Akroyd at their sharpest (love Murphy’s legless street begger and his reaction when he is found out), helped along by Bellamy, Ameche, Curtis and Denholm Elliott as a perplexed and long suffering butler. The film features some interesting social commentary mixed into the humor about the desparity between the haves and the have nots.  The comedy highlight has to be Akroyd, Murphy, Curtis and Elliott running an elaborate scam in over the top disguises at a costume New Years Eve party on a train.  Jim Belushi steals these scenes as an on the make party goer in a gorilla costume (She wants me).

As in years pass I am throwing out some suggestions for alternative films to watch this Christmas Season.  Since last week I put forth one of John Wayne’s less than good films, I thought I would throw out one of his best.  3 Godfathers was another of those great collaborations between Wayne and director John Ford and is essentially a retelling of the three wise men.

As the film opens Wayne, Perdro Armendarez and Harry Carey, Jr rob a bank and head off into the desert with sheriff Ward Bond and his posse in pursuit.  Coming upon a wagon that has been attacked by Indians, they discover a pregnant woman dying and about to give birth.  Helping with the delivery, the woman extracts a promise from them that they will get the baby, which has been named after the three of them, to safety, and then dies.

And so begins a desert crossing trek filled with danger from dehydration, starvation, and attacking Indians, while the posse keeps gets closer.  Armendarez and Carey both die, but Wayne , encouraged by the spectral images of his two dead friends to keep going, manages to arrive on Christmas Eve in the settlement the wagon was heading for where he delivers the baby to the woman’s family and is arrested by Bond.  But it all ends well with Wayne being accepted as a part of the baby’s family and getting a light sentence from the judge due to his heroism.

Yeah the ending is schmaltzy, but you get a great adventure story and those amazing shots of the Monument Valley that appear in all of Ford’s westerns.  John Wayne is at his toughest and most ingratiating, and is even genuinely funny in some of his exchanges with Armendarez and Carey (Don’t talk Mexican in front of the baby!).  And besides, Christmas is a time to be a little schmaltzy.

I like John Wayne movies, there was a time back in the eighties when you couldn’t say that without upsetting some people (I remember in college an older vet on the GI Bill just ripped me a new one for suggesting True Grit when scheduling the campus movies for the semester, the irony was he wasn’t even a member of the film club).  Emotions about The Duke run high and his acting ability is often overshadowed by his politics.

Which is a shame because he was a good actor, he wasn’t Olivier, but he wasn’t Sonny Tufts either.  Like many actors he knew where his niche was and when given the opportunity could really shine, The Searchers and The Shootist being two prime examples.  But every now and then, John Wayne Ultra Patriot would take over and suddenly a movie would become a ridiculous diatribe about The Duke’s beliefs (The Green Berets anyone?)

One of the craziest examples of his gung ho politics is a lesser known espionage potboiler he made in the fifties, Big Jim McClain.  The plot, supposedly based on true events, detail the investigation of Communist activities in Hawaii by super spy John Wayne and his partner James Arness, trying to bring down bemused spy master, a pre-Batman Alan Napier. That’s enough to start the giggles right there.

But wait, it gets better.  The film has not one, not two, but three narrarators. Harry Morgan quotes Nathanial Hawthorne to open and close the film, an unnammed narrarator details how all of this actually happened.  Then The Duke makes like Mickey Spillane and narrarates the rest of the film himself.  A sample of his wittiness is this gem, “Hawaiians work hard all week but when the weekend comes, watch out!”

The scenery is beautiful, which is a good thing because outside of Wayne romancing an innocent secretary of one of the Commie bigwigs, not much happens in the film except for The Duke berating the fact that he can’t even arrest those Godless Commie bastards, even when they commit kidnapping and murder, because they use our own Bill of Rights against us (Not even Jack Webb can hold a candle to The Duke when it comes to righteous indignation).

Yes this is an action extravaganza where crimes are committed and no one gets caught or prosecuted.  Most of the screen time is filled with Wayne eating with his new girlfriend while discussing the case or The Duke using that fool proff investigative technique of accusing someone of being a Red and then leaving thier office or home in disgust.  The movie ends with Wayne being so frustrated at being hamstrung by the very law he ironically is sworn to uphold that he goes to the head Commie’s house and beats the crap out of everyone there, which gets him arrested, then proclaims after another Harry Morgan recitiation, that Mr Hawthorne doesn’t need to worry,  America is still going strong. Cue the credits.