In 1983's Trading Places, Eddie Murphy plays a pauper who becomes a prince of finance. In 1988's Coming To America, he plays a prince who masquerades as a pauper to find his ideal wife. Both films cleaned up at the box office during Murphy's Reagan-era heyday, and both let director John Landis channel Frank Capra. Trading Places taps into the farcical prankster side of Capra's persona—Landis describes it as his version of a '30s-style "social comedy"—in its irreverent tale of a small-time con man (Murphy) who trades places with stuffy über-WASP Dan Aykroyd at the whim of playfully perverse tycoon brothers Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche. America, meanwhile, shares Capra's fondness for moral comedies about pure-hearted innocents who'd rather make their own way in the world than blindly follow tradition. Places' exposition sometimes creaks and groans—it has a lot of plot to unpack, and it takes its sweet time doing so—and its caricatures are broadly drawn, all simpering bluebloods and funky, uninhibited, clothing-averse hustlers. But Aykroyd, Murphy, Bellamy, Ameche, and Jamie Lee Curtis as an impossibly benevolent hooker are perfectly cast, and Elmer Bernstein's Oscar-nominated score and Robert Paynter's cinematography give the film a retro grandeur that's part Charles Dickens, part screwball comedy. In a perfect world, Places would qualify as little more than a solid comedy, but standards have fallen so low that it's largely regarded as a classic, a billing it doesn't quite warrant.