The FilmNerds Blog

Note: Back to the Movies is a special feature on the FilmNerds blog in which Matt Scalici will be watching the Top 50 highest-grossing movies of 1983 in order from 50 to 1.

Comedy is tricky territory when taking on films from another era. While it certainly is possible for comedy to stand the test of time and remain equally funny to subsequent generations, I don’t think it’s necessarily a judgment on a film to say that it doesn’t affect audiences in the same way on the day it’s released as it does 30 years later.

There are lots of different ways to make people laugh and one of those ways involves being right on top of a highly relevant social or political issue. Timely comedy is important and can make people laugh by allowing them to make light of something bad going on in the world around them. Timely comedy does, however, have a tough time remaining fresh as the years go by. Looking at the highest-grossing comedy of 1983, John Landis’ Trading Places, it’s clear that in ’83, audiences responded to comedy about the current conditions of the world at the time. Going down the list of our Top 50 countdown, the comedies that stand up best today, by and large, don’t show up very near the top (with the exception of National Lampoon’s Vacation). The highly nostalgic A Christmas Story is quite possibly the most well-known film comedy on this countdown today in 2011 but barely made a blip at the box office in 1983. Others on the list that I think would be particularly well-received today include the Rodney Dangerfield vehicle Easy Money and Richard Pryor’s standup comedy film Here and Now, neither of which cracked the Top 25.

Trading Places had quite a lot going for it to help make it the most successful comedy release of the year. For one, the release was perfectly timed by Paramount, opening opposite Superman III and at a time when the rest of the nation’s screens were still being taken up by the behemoth that was Return of the Jedi. The only other comedy released in remote proximity of Trading Places was Steve Martin’s offbeat entry The Man with Two Brains, which despite scoring big with critics didn’t finish in the Top 50 in 1983.

That’s not to say Trading Places succeeded just because it was the only game in town. Dan Akroyd and Eddie Murphy were easily two of the hottest young names in comedy in 1983. After leaving Saturday Night Live in 1979, Akroyd quickly established himself as a rising film comedy star with The Blue Brothers film in 1980. Murphy meanwhile was still at the height of his popularity on SNL though he too had begun the transition to full-on movie star after the huge success of 48 Hours in 1982.

 

While the screenplay for Trading Places was initially envisioned as a project for Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, the unavailability of Pryor led to Murphy landing the role of Billy Ray Valentine and out of a desire to avoid looking like he was trying to become “The Next Richard Pryor”, Murphy requested that producers re-cast the part of Louis Winthorpe, the over-privileged white commodities broker. Akroyd has always been notable for his plasticity as a comedy actor, which I’m sure is a big reason he was chosen as one of the founding members of Lorne Michaels’ sketch comedy troupe, and here he showed audiences that the man who played the epitome of cool, calm and collected in The Blues Brothers could just as easily pull off uptight and neurotic.

Murphy was a known quantity by 1983 but still hadn’t quite gotten the message out to mainstream American audiences that he was a man of many faces and voices. Billy Ray as a character is rather similar to the confident, quick-witted Reggie from 48 Hours but here Murphy gets a few opportunities to show off his ability to inhabit multiple roles within the same movie, something he would become known for and indeed something that became expected of him as his career went on. In the scene below, we see Murphy begin to play with the concept of inhabiting alter egos in his film roles and giving the audience not just one but multiple performances to chew on.

The premise of the film is two-fold: the first half of the film is a rather interesting social parable involving two wealthy commodities traders (Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche) who are having the classic argument about Nature vs. Nurture. To settle the argument, the two decide to swap the life roles of two men, one being their well-bred and wealthy protogé Winthorpe (Akroyd) and the other a street urchin and con-man named Billy Ray Valentine (Murphy). The argument for Nurture seems to win out as Winthorpe falls to pieces without all the advantages of wealth while Billy Ray becomes an overnight success at the commodities firm.

It’s at that point that the film switches gears and becomes a film not about that philosophical argument anymore but essentially about the two heroes getting revenge on the rich old villains who used them as guinea pigs. This half of the film as a premise feels a lot less thoughtful and a lot more geared around rather unoriginal and tired jokes involving bad things happening to the bad guys including, in the case of the right hand man of the two Duke brothers, being violated by a gorilla. Har har.

The movie certainly has its moments, most of them coming from simple performance touches by Murphy and Akroyd. At the absolute low point of Winthorpe’s downfall, Akroyd sneaks his way into the company Christmas party dressed as Santa Claus to plant drugs in Billy Ray’s desk but before he does that he decides to stop by the buffet to grab some much-needed free food. The ensuing scene of Winthorpe drunkenly stuffing smoked salmon through his beard is hilariously pathetic.

(Apologies for the low quality clip – it’s the best I could find)

The film concludes with a rather confusing scene involving Winthorpe and Billy Ray somehow tricking the Duke brothers into losing millions of dollars in the frozen concentrated orange juice market. It’s still unclear to me as to what is actually happening (even Murphy has admitted in interviews that he didn’t understand what he was supposed to be doing in the scene) but I guess it’s sufficient to know that the Duke’s lost money in the end and the heroes got their revenge.

The film was overwhelmingly praised by critics in 1983, including a glowing review from Roger Ebert as well as high praise from Janet Maslin of The New York Times who called Trading Places the film that Preston Sturges might have made “if he’d had a little less inspiration and a lot more money.” That’s extremely high praise for John Landis as a director but also for writers Timohy Harris and Herschel Weingrod who went on to co-write such mega-successful comedies as Brewster’s Millions, and Kindergarten Cop in the years that followed.

It’s clear that Trading Places was an undisputed comedy hit in its day and that it remains so in the minds of many who saw it then. Watching it now, I find it to be light on laughs in comparison to what most audiences today expect of their film comedies. That’s not to say it’s not a smart film or a film with no laughs – just to say that if you showed this film in 2011 to an audience full of people who had never seen it before, I don’t believe the laughs would be very frequent, at least not as frequent as you’d hear in a typical contemporary comedy hit. That probably says a lot more about the way comedies are made today than it does about the quality of Trading Places as a film but it’s still worth noting. As I mentioned at the start of this review, I believe comedy is a very temporal and fast-moving animal and it’s rare to ever find a comedy that remains funny to audiences more than a few decades separated from it. Trading Places is a good movie but I’m not totally sure the laughs hit as hard today as they did in 1983.

 

DOWNLOAD: Back to the Movies Podcast – Trading Places (with guest Jason Roche)

 

Next Up: Jennifer Beals and Cynthia Rhodes star in the iconic dance movie Flashdance.

Note: Back to the Movies is a special feature on the FilmNerds blog in which Matt Scalici will be watching the Top 50 highest-grossing movies of 1983 in order from 50 to 1.

On paper, Twilight Zone: The Movie sounds like a tremendously exciting proposition: four directors, including Stephen Spielberg, each take a classic episode of Rod Serling’s sci-fi/fantasy television series and put their own unique spin on it with a modern cast and modern special effects, all set to a Jerry Goldsmith score. Unfortunately, as is often the case with these multi-director anthology projects, the segments are vastly inconsistent in quality. But when you examine which segments shine and which fail, the results are a little surprising.

Twilight Zone‘s relatively underwhelming success (considering it features “directed by Stephen Spielberg” on the poster) probably has more to do with this lack of consistency than anything else but the film also faced a particularly large PR nightmare upon its release in the summer of 1983. The film’s first segment, “Time Out” directed by John Landis, suffered a tragedy during its production when star Vic Morrow along with two child actors were killed during the filming of a stunt. It was undoubtedly one of the biggest entertainment scandals of the year and when you read the full details of exactly what happened (Tru TV’s crime library has an excellent summary of the incident) it’s hard not to feel pretty disgusted by the whole project.

Scandal aside, Landis’ opening segment stands on its own as a dreadful piece of filmmaking. “Time Out”, not coincidentally the only one of the segments not directly inspired by one of Serling’s stories, follows a horribly racist man who is taught a lesson by the universe when he walks out of a bar and inexplicably finds himself in Nazi Germany being chased through the streets by soldiers who think he’s Jewish. He finds himself jumping around the timeline into the bodies of other persecuted peoples (Quantum Leap style) including becoming a black man surrounded by a KKK lynch mob and becoming a Vietnamese man hiding from American troops in a swamp.

This segment has so many problems they aren’t even all worth mentioning (most of it resulting from insultingly bad writing) but I found it particularly amazing that Spielberg and the rest of the producers thought it was a good idea to draw parallels between American troops in Vietnam and Nazis and Klansmen. For the record, I know they weren’t intending to do that but it’s one of the many oversights in this segment that shows that Landis just wasn’t being held accountable during this production, both on the creative side and on the production side. The segment’s original ending involved Morrow’s character learning his lesson and promising to protect two small Vietnamese children after their families are killed in an explosion. Sadly, it was that very explosion that led to the tragic accident that killed Morrow and the two child actors and the segment was altered to end with Morrow’s character being carted away to a Nazi death camp, a grim ending to a joyless and thoroughly uninspired story.

Spielberg takes the helm for the second segment, entitled “Kick the Can”, and while the segment suffers from a messy screenplay, there are at least momentary glimpses of Spielberg’s unmistakeable magic. The segment centers around a nursing home filled with a variety of colorful elderly characters. When a new resident arrives, played by Scatman Crothers (who we saw earlier as an angel in Two of a Kind), he offers to help them all become young again, an offer the old folks gladly accept. The story ends up being more of a lesson about the grass always being greener but the segment is at its best when we get to see the elderly residents cavorting around the yard as children. The scene will immediately make anything Spielberg fan think of Hook, particularly the classic food fight scene. Spielberg’s ability to channel that magical sense of childish wonder that made that those scenes in Hook so memorable are all right here in this segment. While the story feels rushed and never really grabs us, even a little unstructured Spielberg, especially ’80s Spielberg, is always a treat.

The third segment, Joe Dante’s “It’s a Good Life”, is by far the highlight of the film and not because it does a better job of fleshing out its characters or telling a complete story (because it doesn’t). It’s just a ton of fun. Dante entered the project with perhaps the most to prove of any of the four directors, having moved quickly out of the B-movie horror scene into the limelight after the surprising critical and commercial success of The Howling in 1981. My research has failed to reveal whether Dante’s work here in Twilight Zone was something that came before Spielberg decided to hire him to direct Gremlins or after but either way, the seeds for Gremlins are evident through this segment.

We follow the journey of a random woman into the increasingly bizarre and insane world of a child who has the power to make his wishes come true, usually with horrifying results. The cast of people living in the child’s cartoonish house are all tremendously entertaining and bizarre, particularly Nancy Cartwright (a.k.a. the voice of Bart Simpson) as Ethel, and Dante wisely allows the premise to slowly reveal itself only after exposing us to a variety of bizarre and unexplainable scenes, my favorite being the horrifying reveal of the boy’s actual sister (played by lead singer of The Runaways Cherie Currie)

Dante’s use of grotesque and horrifying puppets is also fun to watch here, particularly his real-world version of the Tasmanian Devil. I always felt a big part of the appeal of Gremlins was the very tactile (if pretty obviously fake) look of the puppets, which even in their awkward movements feel ten times as real as any CGI creation you’ll see in 2010.

The final segment is a remake of perhaps the most famous episode of The Twilight Zone, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”, which originally starred a then-unknown William Shatner and was directed by then-unknown director Richard Donner. In the 1983 version, the always great John Lithgow replaces Shatner and Mad Max director George Miller takes over behind the camera. If you’ve seen the original television episode (or one of its hundreds of parodies) you know already how the story goes: a man with a fear of flying is tortured by the recurring sight of a monster on the wing of his plane and despite his warnings, no one on the plane believes him. Lithgow certainly outdoes Shatner when it comes to the intensity of his performance and while there’s nothing innovative about the story itself here, the special effects technology of 1983 allows Miller to turn what was once a silly man in a suit into a genuinely creepy creature. It’s a fun segment and does the best job out of the four at actually providing a satisfying ending to the story.

The little prologue and epilogue segments featuring Dan Akroyd are nice enough (particularly the opening segment with Albert Brooks) but don’t really serve to tie the film together at all. People often complain about anthology projects like this not adding up to something “more than the sum of the parts” but I think that’s an unfair expectation. I have no problem with a series of loosely affiliated short films released together as a single theatrical experience. In my opinion, the short film can be a real venue for great filmmaking and it’s a shame there aren’t more opportunities for the best filmmakers in the business to create shorter works.

What we get here is one atrociously bad film, one mediocre but still worthwhile film, one fantastically bizarre and creative film, and one tight, superbly made thriller. Considering some of the other garbage I’ve seen over the course of this project, I think what Twilight Zone: The Movie offers in terms of entertainment value is on par with almost anything we’ve seen so far in our 1983 journey.

Next Up: The Disney-produced nature drama Never Cry Wolf.