Like every Christmas here An armchair for two. This evening on Italia 1 at 9.45pm there is the classic “Italian” for the holidays. And it will probably be the twenty-seventh time this has happened. The film of John Landis of 1983 therefore seems to have supplanted “good-hearted” films in Christmas tastes Life is wonderful (1946) by Frank Capra. Look at the movie in which social and economic hierarchies are overturned, in which we reason around an egalitarian redistribution of income. An armchair for two, as we wrote a few weeks ago when it was released for three days at the cinema (9-10-11 December) it is a comedy so bold and whirlwind in pace, so shamelessly funny in representing the hatefulness of the rich and the simplicity of the poor, which haven't been made for a long time.
Looking at it from an Italian perspective, An armchair for two it could have been an idea, a plot, like Risi or Monicelli. The two elderly East Coast wasp billionaires, the Duke brothers (Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy), bet a dollar (!) on a forced exchange of person to confirm or not their two different philosophical assumptions: the environment creates and makes man (socialism, does this tell you anything?) or is it the talent of each person to create their own fortune (hyperliberalism please). The victims of the “scientific” experiment are their protégé, the haughty, white broker Louis Winthorpe III (Dan Aykroyd) and the faux-crippled black Gascon beggar Billie Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy). The two old men are delightfully wicked and inhuman in stripping Louis of his money and affections, as if suddenly raining down all his goodness, including butler and Jacuzzi, on Billie Ray. Landis comfortable with robust and extreme stereotypes (the blacks, the Nazis, the snobbish whites, the dropouts) is ironically inspired by the poetics of Capra and Preston Sturges, but does something more. It imposes, precisely in the impossible brotherhood between Louis and Billie Ray, the prostitute Ophelia (Jamie Lee Curtis) and the butler Coleman (Denholm Elliott), a very communal solution modeled on the New Deal: it destroys the powerful criminal exploiters on the stock market (today they are and would be dramaturgically venerated masters of life ed.) and show the joy of coexistence without class distinctions.
Then it's clear An armchair for two it can also be studied just for how a director, author, creator like John Landis – never too exalted for the great genius that he (was) – lets breathe in his films (The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London) an air of total compositional freedom, of playful destructiveness of times, spaces, narrative certainties. We recently discovered that in full delirium cancel culture the scene in which the treacherous Duke man, the one who implements the plan to transform the lives of Louis and Billie Ray, even corrupting the police, is framed and punished by two protagonists, ending up locked in a cage where a drunken gorilla ( with the costume and fake mask and exhibited as such) sodomizes him, was contested as offensive towards the LGBTQ+ community. Ditto for Aykroyd disguised as a Jamaican with black shoe polish on his face and dreadlocks lacking sensitivity towards the African American community. It is difficult to understand whether those who reevaluate the past every two by three by decontextualizing details and sense of the present of the time are capable of studying the cultural and symbolic meaning of certain narrative choices without making those who laugh and appreciate them feel guilty. The Landis of the time would have given these moralists a resounding raspberry.
