Trading Places (1983)
This popular comedy – directed by John Landis, and written by Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod – takes the grand canvas of the stock market, and paints an elaborate vista of social hierarchy, revenge and redemption, as two men play with the lives of another two men, and everyone gets what is coming to them.
Two successful commodities brokers (Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche) make a wager based on their opposing views about the ‘nature versus nurture’ philosophical debate. They proceed to conduct a live experiment, wherein they manipulate the aftermath of a chance encounter between their own, wealthy employee, Louis (Dan Ackroyd), and a homeless man – Billy (Eddie Murphy).
The experiment sees the two subjects effectively switch places in their manufactured social hierarchy, but when Billy overhears the details of the plan, the two men plot to bring their manipulators down. They achieve this by uncovering a plan the brokers have for insider trading, and use the information to bankrupt the pair, while simultaneously generating vast profit for themselves. The two pairs of men thus ‘trade places.’
In its social commentary and depictions of corruption among brokers, Trading Places was something of an unusual movie when it was released in 1983. While the latter portion of that decade would see waves of films noting the excesses of American society of the time – particularly after the stock market crash of 1987 – Trading Places arrived ahead of that trend. Similarly, while films about monetary misdeeds are fairly common in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Trading Places occupies a space among movies that perhaps served as advance warning of what was to come.