Jim Belushi – Movie Musings

Very 80s comedy, full of rude gags and the glories of money still funny in many places

Director: John Landis

Cast: Dan Aykroyd (Louis Winthorpe III), Eddie Murphy (Billy Ray Valentine), Ralph Bellamy (Randolph Duke), Don Ameche (Mortimer Duke), Denholm Elliott (Coleman), Jamie Lee Curtis (Ophelia), Paul Gleason (Clarence Beeks), Kristin Holby (Penelope Witherspoon), Jim Belushi (Harvey)

Louis Winthorpe III (Dan Aykroyd) has it all. A house in Philadelphia, glamourous fiancée and high-flying job as Managing Director at Duke & Duke, the leading blue-chip commodities brokers. Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy) has nothing: penniless, homeless, hustling on the Philly streets. But is their fate due to nature or nurture? Finding that out is the subject of a bet between heartless Duke brothers Randolph (Ralph Bellamy) and Mortimer (Don Ameche). They turn both men’s lives upside-down by swopping their positions – Louis will be disgraced and left with nothing and Billy Ray will get his house and job. Will they fall or rise? And what will they do when they find out their lives are the Duke’s playthings?

Trading Places was one of the big box-office smashes of 1983, a film that changed the lives of virtually the whole cast. It showed the world Aykroyd could carry a comedy without partner Jim Belushi, gave a second career to Bellamy and Ameche, led Curtis to say the role “changed her life” from just a scream queen and, perhaps most of all, turned Murphy into a mega-star. It’s still witty, fast-paced and funny today, even if in places it’s not always aged well.

Landis takes a screwball approach, unsettling the lives of two contrasting people and then throwing them into an unlikely revenge partnership. Trading Places is very strong on the contrasting world of rich and poor. The wood-lined, club-bound world of the Dukes is carefully staged, paintings of financial and political grandees staring down from walls as assured, masters-of-the-universe easily sachet around posh clubs and squash clubs, to the sound of Elmer Bernstein’s Mozart-inspired score. By contrast, the rough, litter-lined squalor of Philadelphia’s poorer neighbourhoods is unflinchingly shown with, under the comedy, the suggestion life is cheap and everyone is for sale.

Of course, a lot of the ensuing laughs come from seeing a rich person who has only known comfort thrown into this life of a tramp and vice versa. Ackroyd’s Winthorpe bristles with disbelief at his situation and the rich man’s blithe assurance that (any moment) someone will say there has been a terrible mistake carries a lot of comic force. Meanwhile, Murphy’s fast-talking Billy Ray assumes he is the subject of an elaborate prank (or perverted sex game) as stuffs the pockets of his first tailored suit with knick-knacks around the house the Duke’s assure him is now his. Hustler Billy Ray turns out, of course, to be well-suited to the blue-collar hustle of financial trading. He also finds himself, much to his surprise, increasingly interested in the culture and artworks around him.

Under all this, Trading Places has a surprisingly negative view of rich and poor. Louis posh friends and shallow fiancée are all status-obsessed snobs who turn on him in minutes when he is framed for theft, embezzlement and drug trafficking. The servants in their posh clubs – all, interestingly, Black men in a quiet statement on race that you still wish the film could take somewhere more interesting – are treated as little better than speaking items of furniture and there is a singular lack of interest or concern for anyone outside their social bubble. Playing fair, every working-class character we see (apart from Curtis and Murphy) is lazy, grasping and shallow, ignoring Billy Ray until they can get something from him, at which point they fall over each other to snatch freebies from his house.

Trading Places is, in many ways, a very 80s screwball. Money is the aim and reward here. Trading Places has respect only for aspirational characters who save and invest their money. (Curtis’ prostitute is marked out as savvy and decent because she has invested nearly $42k from her work in a nest-egg). The film culminates in a financial scam (playing out on the trading floor of the World Trading Centre) designed to reward our heroes with wealth and punish the villains with poverty. For all the film stares at the reality of poverty and riches, the implications and injustices of wealth are ignored, with money ultimately framed as a vindication.

But then, Trading Places is just a comedy so perhaps that’s reading a bit too much in it. There is a frat-house energy to Trading Places under its elaborate framing and a lot of its gags come from a rude, smutty cheek that sometimes goes too far (not least a punchline involving a villain being repeatedly raped by a randy gorilla). Murphy’s energy – every scene has the crackle of improvised wildness to it – is certainly dynamic (this is probably his funniest and – eventually – most likeable role) and while Aykroyd is a stiffer comic presence, he makes an effective contrast with Murphy.

The real stars here though are the four supporting actors. Bellamy and Ameche seize the opportunity to play the villains of the piece with an experienced gusto, brilliantly funny in scene-stealing turns. Outwardly debonair, the seemingly cudily Bellamy and prickly Ameche superbly reveal the greed and casual cruelty of these two heartless Scrooges. Elliot is also extremely funny, and the most likeable character, as a kind butler just about disguising his loathing of the Dukes. Curtis’ vivacity and charm makes a lot of an under-written “hooker with a heart of a Gold” trope – like her co-stars she seizes her chance with a fun role.

Some of Trading Places has of course not aged well. Jokes with gay slurs pop up a little too frequently. While the Duke’s use of racist language makes sense (after all they are vile people who see Billy Ray as nothing but a curious toy), it’s more of a shock to hear our nominal hero Louis do the same. Murphy’s improvised sexual harassing of a woman on the streets (ending with him screaming “bitch!” after her when she walks off) doesn’t look good. Curtis twice exposes her breasts for no reason. The film’s closing heist involves Aykroyd blacking up and affecting a Jamaican accent.

But, dubious as some of this is now (and while you can argue times have changed, surely even then some people would have been unsettled by this sort of stuff framed for good-old-belly laughs), Trading Places is still funny enough to be a pleasure. And, with the performances of Bellamy, Ameche, Elliot and Curtis we have four very good actors providing a humanity and professionalism to ground two wilder comedians. It’s easy to see why this was a hit.

Oliver Stone’s passionate denunciation of American policy, highly politicised but electrically made

Director: Oliver Stone

Cast: James Woods (Richard Boyle), Jim Belushi (Doctor Rock), Michael Murphy (Ambassador Thomas Kelly), John Savage (John Cassady), Elpida Carrillo (Maria), Cindy Gibb (Cathy Moore), Tony Plana (Major Maximiliano Casanova), José Carlos Ruiz (Archbishop Oscar Romero)

To many countries the Cold War was very hot. The USA and USSR may not have crossed swords personally, but they were happy to funnel money and arms to governments and resistance groups in other countries to fight for them. The Salvadoran Civil War became another proxy battleground for East vs West – or rather Capitalism vs Communism. The US backed the military dictatorship, the USSR the left-wing revolutionaries. Caught in the middle? The people of El Salvador and their shattered human rights.

It’s not surprising this attracted the attention of Oliver Stone. Released in the same year as Platoon, Salvador is the second half of a one-two punch against the failures of American intervention. It was considerably less palatable to the masses though: Salvador is a furious, spittle-mouthed denunciation of American policy. Unlike Platoon where the victim is basically the innocence of a whole generation of Americans (an American tragedy), here you can’t fail to notice America is one of the bad guys. To Stone, El Salvador (as Richard Boyle points out in the film) was America’s chance to fight Vietnam again, only this time “right”: win it while sacrificing the lives of another country instead. It’s a considerably less easy to digest message.

Salvador is based on a fictionalised version of gonzo-journalist Richard Boyle (played with mesmeric intensity by an Oscar-nominated James Woods) who escapes from the mess of his life in San Francisco to cover the war first hand in El Salvador. There he finds himself growing increasingly sympathetic to the left-wing rebels, as the US-backed government forces commit atrocity after atrocity: mountains of corpses, assassinations and out-of-control death squads. And no-one in the embassy wants to admit to it, not when they are more concerned about keeping El Salvador from going Red. To stop that, any price is worth paying.

It makes for a passionate, angry but not subtle film. But then is Oliver Stone known for anything else? It hectors, it bellows, it hammers its points home. Stone’s writing is often a touch simplistic. There are traces of the unpleasant racism of Stone’s scripted Midnight Express in the scruffy, lecherous vileness of many of the government troops while death squad leader Major Max (Tony Plana) struts around like a mix of Tony Montana and Henry II, all but saying “who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” as he plots the murder of leading protestor Archbishop Oscar Romero.

It’s a film that lands punches that would have been better pulled. I could have done without the all-too-detailed recreation of the rape and murder of four American missionaries by a government death squad. Changing the names, doesn’t change the fact that these are fundamentally real people whose final moments are staged with a little too much queasy detail (or close-ups of their mistreated, bullet ridden bodies). But then, Stone is equally unafraid – and perhaps rightly so – to show us mountains of dead Salvadoran bodies, including children, so maybe it’s hypocritical of me to argue restraint for American victims.

Stone shoots the film with a real urgency and immediacy. Boyle frequently makes his way to the heat of the action and the camera follows him right in there. It ducks and sways among panicked mobs of people. It sees charges of horse-backed revolutionaries head towards it. It follows Boyle through devastated streets and scenes of despicable human carnage. It doesn’t flinch from executions and murders and when Boyle is thrown to the ground by explosions and gunfire, it goes down with him. Stone allows bombastic excess into the film, twinned with a score that adds a little too much classical self-importance, but at least his reasoning behind making this an overwhelming film makes sense. The whole ghastly civil war is overwhelming.

And so is America’s part in it. Aside from the ambassador – a Carter-ish hangover, played with ineffectual decency by Michael Murphy – the figures we see from government are heartless, cold warriors, interested only in the ends and caring nothing for the means. They pour money into death squads, provide air support and tanks for rebels to be strafed on the ground and are totally indifferent to morality. The media largely backs them all the way, parroting the government line and painting the revolutionaries as terrorists. They even suggest those dead missionaries were either foolish or mixed up with the rebels – either way fundamentally responsible for their deaths.

The government contrasts with the “ordinary” Americans we see. Missionaries down here to do good. And, of course, the cryptic figure of Richard Boyle. Boyle is, in many ways, a deeply unsympathetic character. Woods makes him selfish, sleazy and self-interested, constantly letting people down and taking what he can get from friendships and situations. But the things he sees in El Salvador reawakens his sense of right and wrong. He’s vile but he’s kind of brave. He will call out what he sees as wrong. He will protect others, instinctively covering those he loves when bullets fly.

And, finally, he tries to do something right, smuggling his girlfriend Maria (sweetly played by Elpidia Carrillo) and her young son back to America (needless to say, the authorities do not react well). Part of Salvador’s success is in seeing Woods perfectly craft a character arc that takes a man interested only in himself through to putting himself at risk for innocents. It’s a long road from the gonzo washout who drives down to the country stoned with drinking buddy Dr Rock (Jim Belushi, rather good as grungy stoner, sweeter than he appears, who grows to love the country and its people).

He’s a complex hero though, superbly bought to life by Woods in a performance that’s like a raw wound in a complex film. While Platoon could be seen, for all its loss of innocence, as a film where America was the victim, Salvador casts the country as the villain sharing morally responsibility for the piles of corpses Boyle picks his way through. Stone acknowledges the crimes of the revolutionaries – Boyle furiously denounces them for their shooting of unarmed soldiers pleading for the lives – but his real anger in this passionate, vibrant polemic is America itself. It’s delivered with verve, commitment and drama and helps make Salvador one of his best and most overlooked films.