Classical Music and Cinema: Mozart and 'Trading Places'

Location isn't usually important in film comedies the way say, Los Angels is vital to dramas like Chinatown or Chicago to action-thrillers like The Fugitive. Comedies trade in laughs and laughs come from people and situations and animals with digestive ailments. Places don't crack us up.

Then why do I never forget that one of my favorite comedies--Trading Places (1983)--takes place in Philadelphia? We can thank its unforgettable opening flipbook of the city's icons next to images of ordinary people going to work and the city's poor not having any. The montage is set to Mozart's 'Overture to the Mariage of Figarro,' which we've heard a million times but never quite like this--as an argument for the artistry of comedy rather than an affirmation of its frivolity. Listening to Mozart does not make you smarter. But in Trading Places, Director John Landis and his composer (the legendary Elmer Bernstein) use Mozart as a shorthand reminder that comedies need not make you dumber either.

The plot of Trading Places has been called a modern update of Mark Twain's "Prince and the Pauper." A rich stuffed shirt (Dan Aykroyd) and a street hustler (Eddie Murphy) are made to switch social places by Ackroyd's conniving uncles who like to conduct social experiments of such things. When the two uncover the uncles' sneaky plan to game the commodities market, they strike first, beating them at their own scam and getting rich in the process. It being the early 1980s, defeating old, inherited money through fleet footed stock trading was seen as the rebellion of youth, blows against the empire, a victory for tweed over eh, tweed.

Trading Places did great with critics and has endured mostly because its a fantastic silly comedy (SNL veterans Ackroyd and Murphy and a sequence with a horny gorilla made sure of that) that doesn't scrimp on the fundamentals. The supporting cast bench--Jamie Lee Curtis, Ralph Bellmany, Don Ameche and Denholm Elliott--is embarrassingly deep. The script...