For 35 years, a battered Santa Claus has been biting a salmon hidden in his fake beard in front of the disgusted passengers of a bus and the audience poised between grin and melancholy. He is the former wealthy financier Louis Winthorpe III (Dan Aykroyd) at the height of his social descent in John Landis’s “A Seat for Two” (1983), at the center of a $1 bet made by his bosses, the Randolph brothers and Duke Mortimer, who decide to make a fortune for black beggar Billie Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy) and bankrupt their protégé Louis to see if he’ll become a criminal. For Mortimer (Don Ameche) you are born predisposed to crime, for Duke (Ralph Bellamy) the social class you are in counts: an experiment in exchanging social position. Set during Christmas, inspired by the novel «The rich man and the poor man» (1881) by Mark Twain, the comedy flourishes when the victims – understand the game – team up to break the bank.
December 24, 2022 | 09:47
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