‘Trading Places’ is a paean to the sort of filmmaking which is a throwback to a different era, exemplified here by featuring two titans from Hollywood’s golden age, Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche, as two business tycoon brothers who undertake a one dollar wager as to whether it is nature or nurture that makes us who we are. They take smug Ivy League broker Dan Aykroyd, who has all the benefits of an education, good breeding and wealth, and take away all of the advantages that his status provides, and swap him with Eddie Murphy’s street hustler and con man as a social experiment.

There are two sides to the bet, as Murphy’s rise into the echelons of luxury and richness is juxtaposed with Aykroyd’s descent into homelessness, crime and poverty. It is a bit of a stretch to imagine that this can all happen over the course of the Christmas period, but there is a larger theological and philosophical treatise into which this film taps which mirrors the trajectory of Job in the Hebrew Bible who was himself the object of a wager between God and Satan as to whether Job would renounce his belief in God if he was subject to the loss of his family, livelihood and health.

The biblical wager doesn’t bring about the answer that Satan, one of the attenders in the celestial court who initiates the bet, is expecting, and here too Bellamy and Ameche conceitedly imagine that they can play games with people’s lives for their own gratification and do not conceive of there being any consequences for themselves. ‘Trading Places’ thus turns out to have more layers to it than simply showing us two characters trading lifestyles in an analogous fashion to the spate of body swapping comedies that Hollywood was good at turning out in this era, from ‘Vice Versa’ and ‘Chances Are’ to ‘Freaky Friday’ and ‘Face/Off’. ‘Face/Off’ is actually a good parallel as in that case John Travolta and Nicolas Cage don’t simply inhabit each other’s bodies but their personalities also start to dovetail and both find themselves acting in ways that their former selves could not have countenanced, as when Cage’s psychopath rescues rather than deflowers his nemesis’ teenage daughter.

In ‘Trading Places’ Bellamy and Ameche don’t imagine that the two individuals whose lives they meddle with could possibly form an alliance of their own in order to outwit their mentors. And Jamie Lee Curtis’ character also subverts expectations in a way that prefigures ‘Pretty Woman’ seven years later (in which Bellamy also appeared) as a prostitute with a flair for business which outflanks that which Aykroyd himself is able to countenance. Everyone here has or develops a counterpoint personae which readies them for what happens when they lose everything. The greater the loss they face, the bigger and more enriching the comeuppance.