Paramount

Every office has one. Peggy Spade (Shannon) is that co-worker who always seems to be up. You know the kind. Always smiling even when there are a lot of crappy things going on around her, she walks through life oblivious to it all. Now don’t get me wrong. These people do have their uses and can often relieve the stress of a particularly bad day. I mean, don’t you feel a little better after just a minute or two of putting your hands around their throat and squeezing just a little? Alas, I digress. What is the source of Peggy’s blissful nature? It’s none other than Pencil, her faithful pet dog. Pencil is her emotional center, leaving her quite awkward around most humans. Unfortunately for Peggy, Pencil gets out one night and into a bag of a “toxic poison” (Isn’t that redundant.) Quicker than you can say Michael Vick, Pencil is gone. When Pencil goes to that doggy pound in the sky, Peggy becomes depressed that is until she meets Valentine, a German shepherd with a maladjusted personality of his own. She also begins to relate to the man who introduces her to Valentine as well as a PETA-like pro-animal movement. Peggy becomes a radical, and it nearly destroys her life.

If you come to the film expecting a cozy little dog film you can cuddle up with, you will be disappointed. Having a stubborn Siberian Husky myself, I am almost always suckered into pretty much any film that has dogs in it. I even converted my wife. A long standing cat person, she fell in love with the puppy dog eyes of a pointer mix. That should tell you that I am predisposed to like most dog films. I wish I could tell you I liked Year Of The Dog.

Eddie Murphy has a ton of films under his belt. If you’re like most folks, his antics have long ago become tired and worn out. Come with me now to a time when Murphy was young and full of energy. Trading Places was really only Murphy’s second film after 48 hours. In Trading Places, we get vintage Eddie Murphy. You can tell he was still hungry. Today he simply calls too many performances in. Dan Aykroyd was also at a turning point in his own career. It hadn’t been too long since he lost his longtime partner Jim Belu...hi to a drug overdose. He was just learning to stand on his own. Put these two guys together today, and there’s not much chance you’d get the solid gold that was possible in 1983. Fortunately for us there is this DVD release of Trading Places, when both actors still felt they had something to prove. The cast was brilliant all the way around. Jamie Lee Curtis displayed her obvious assets for the first time in a film. Known mostly as a scream queen at that time, Curtis was a choice the studio was not at all happy with. The Wolf Man’s own Ralph Bellamy, along with fellow veteran actor Don Amechi, played the Duke brothers to perfection. Finally, Denholm Eliott added his own understated brilliance as Coleman, the butler.

Trading Places was originally written as a vehicle for Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. That team had had great success with a few films already, and it was felt they were the only ones capable of pulling off this kind of a film. I’m not sure how that might have worked. Certainly it still might have been a funny outing, but somehow I think everything worked out for the best. Trading places broke many conventions of the time. The black and white stereotypes were a concern, as were other elements. Having a hooker play such a pivotal role was questioned. The studio even expressed some problems with the fate of Mr. Beaks. A little gorilla love went a long way toward the poetic justice these kinds of villians often require. John Landis stood his ground the entire time, refusing to budge. Remove any of these elements, and who knows what we might have ended up with.