Player is loading
As has been the case continuously since 1997, this year Italia 1 will again be broadcasting one of the most famous comedies of the 1980s on Christmas Eve with John Landis’ film “An Armchair for Two”, starring Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd. The film continues to have good ratings every year: Laura Casarotto, director of Italia 1 since 2014, once hypothesized that the success of An Armchair for Two was linked to the fact that “we always want to hear the same story at Christmas”.
Originally titled Trading Places, A Chair for Two was released in 1983 and tells the Philadelphia vacation story of stockbroker Louis Winthorpe (Aykroyd) and beggar Billie Valentine (Murphy). One of the things the film is known for is that it might not be immediately understandable in all its passages, especially at the end and especially for those who don’t know what the future is.
Winthorpe, Aykroyd’s character, is shallow and obnoxious, with a rich and seemingly perfect life; Valentine, Murphy’s, is instead rude and deceitful, but very kind.
The former’s employers, the two older Duke brothers, decide to hatch a complicated bet by swapping the places of Louis Winthorpe and Billie Valentine: Valentine has a prestigious job at the stock exchange while Winthorpe loses everything. According to the intentions of the brothers, the experiment should decide whether people are genetically susceptible to crime or whether it is rather the environment in which they live that conditions them.
The Dukes then frame Winthorpe, have him arrested, and offer Valentine a prestigious role in their firm. Valentine proves to be an excellent stock market investor, while Winthorpe, despairing of having lost everything, violently breaks into a Christmas party organized by Duke & Duke.
The Duke brothers consider their experiment complete: people’s tendency to behave well is a result of the social context that surrounds them. One of them then pays the other the price of the lost bet – a dollar – and then they both figure out how to get rid of Valentine, who, however, is there when the bet is paid out and understands everything. He and Winthorpe team up and decide to find a way to make the Dukes lose everything in a stock trade.
– Also read: What Jamie Lee Curtis thinks about A Chair for Two being a classic Christmas movie in Italy
What are futures
In the film, the dukes had bribed a commissioner to get an advance report on orange crops. Knowing in advance how production was going, the Dukes planned to buy orange juice futures contracts to speculate on the stock market.
Futures are contracts signed by two parties who agree to exchange a certain amount of goods at a predetermined price at a future date. So if you sell the goods in futures, you do not yet own them and are betting that the price will fall in the future: If you are correct, you can buy the goods on the market shortly before the expiry date and then pay the price difference between the sum paid and the – higher – collect the amount agreed in the contract with the buyer. The buyer, on the other hand, makes the opposite bet: if the price has gone up, he gets the goods at a reduced price, can therefore collect the difference, and then sell them at the market price.
– Also read: What to do with Christmas dinner
The last scene of A Chair for Two
Winthorpe and Valentine manage to intercept the commissioner who has to deliver the report on the oranges to the Dukes and find that the harvest has gone well. They therefore send the dukes a false document with the opposite information: believing that the harvest would have been poor and that therefore the future price of orange juice would have increased, the brothers invest all their capital by entering into futures contracts and committing to buy They upfront, confident that they will benefit from a low price that will surge once the report is released. Other investors are following suit, driving the price of oranges up further.
At this point, Winthorpe and Valentine begin to enter futures as sellers: that is, they commit to selling the oranges in the future at a price that other investors think is very low because they believe the harvest would be poor.
After minutes of crowding, with investors flocking to Winthorpe and Valentine and the Dukes wondering what’s going on, comes the official announcement: the harvest has gone well. Alarmed investors are forced to buy oranges at a price well in excess of the market price. They then begin offering futures as sellers, and Winthorpe and Valentine, after waiting for the price to drop significantly, agree to buy.
At this point in time, the agreed price for the purchase of the oranges is significantly lower than that of the contracts concluded shortly before as a seller. Essentially, they manage to sell oranges they don’t already have at a very high price and then buy the oranges they need to sell at a much, much lower price.
This practice is known as short selling. The dukes, relying on incorrect information, instead find that they made the opposite bet and thus lose their fortune.
What Winthorpe and Valentine practiced was a form of insider trading, making stock market trades based on non-public information; but specifically what they were doing in the film, speculating on the basis of confidential government sources, was not illegal in the 1980s. So it became in 2010 with a law sometimes referred to as the “Eddie Murphy Rule.”
– Also read: 20 Christmas traditions from around the world